In linguistics, mirativity, initially proposed by Scott DeLancey, is a grammatical category in a language, independent of evidentiality,[1][2] that encodes the speaker's surprise or the unpreparedness of their mind.
[8][9] According to DeLancey (1997), Turkish, Hare, Sunwar, Lhasa Tibetan, and Korean exhibit a grammatical category to mark information that is new to the speaker.
'However, the mirative account does not hold for the following sentence, where 'dug is used as an auxiliary verb and has nothing to do with surprise, sudden discovery nor unexpectedness:[23][24] nga1na-gi-'dug.sick-PRES-AUXnga na-gi-'dug.1 sick-PRES-AUX`I'm sick at the moment.
'While DeLancey (2012) made no mention of Turkish, Sunwar or Korean, he still promoted Hare, Kham, and Magar as clear cases of miratives.
Hill (2015) in response provided an alternative analysis of Hare, re-analyzing DeLancey's evidence for 'mirativity' as direct evidentiality.
[25] Hengeveld and Olbertz (2012) argue against Hill (2012) for miratives as a distinct category, citing data from Tarma Quechua, Ecuadorian Highland Spanish, Xamamauteri (a Yanomaman language), Kham, and Cupeño.
[29] This suggests that mirativity forms a different grammatical category from evidentiality while surprise and counter-expectation are expressed by different particles in the language.