27.2560, Diss: Cog Sci, Morphology, Pragmatics, Syntax, Typology: José Hugo García-Macías: 'From the Unexpected to the Unbelievable: Thetics, Miratives and Exclamatives in Conceptual Space'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2560. Fri Jun 10 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2560, Diss: Cog Sci, Morphology, Pragmatics, Syntax, Typology: José Hugo García-Macías: 'From the Unexpected to the Unbelievable: Thetics, Miratives and Exclamatives in Conceptual Space'

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Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2016 10:49:40
From: José García-Macías [jhgarcia at unm.edu]
Subject: From the Unexpected to the Unbelievable: Thetics, Miratives and Exclamatives in Conceptual Space

 
Institution: University of New Mexico 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2016 

Author: José Hugo García-Macías

Dissertation Title: From the Unexpected to the Unbelievable: Thetics, Miratives 
and Exclamatives in Conceptual Space 

Dissertation URL:  http://hdl.handle.net/1928/32294

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
                     Morphology
                     Pragmatics
                     Syntax
                     Typology


Dissertation Director(s):
William Croft

Dissertation Abstract:

This study investigates the relationship between three linguistic functions:
thetics, miratives and exclamatives. Thetics are an information structure
configuration that conveys that the information is new to the addressee. The
thetic subtypes selected for this study are the following: existentials (e.g.
There are apples in the kitchen); presentatives (e.g. Here’s your book);
weather statements (e.g. It rains); physical sensation statements (e.g. My
HEAD hurts) and hot news (e.g. MIchael JACKson died). Thetics do not perform a
predication but present the state of affairs as a whole. Crosslinguistically,
they tend to use morphosyntactic strategies that distinguish them from
prototypical predications. Similar morphosyntactic strategies can also be
found in miratives and exclamatives. Miratives are defined as grammatical
markers that convey that the information is suprising for the speaker, whereas
exclamatives are defined as a sentence type that conveys surprise with respect
to a scalar extent that has surpassed the current expectations (e.g. How
beautiful you are!). I hypothesize that the structural similarities between
these functions are motivated by semantic resemblance. The structural features
of these functions are compared in a sample of 76 languages, from which 360
constructions were extracted. Multidimensional scaling was used in order to
construct a spatial representation of the degree of similarity/dissimilarity
of the constructions. The resulting spatial map shows a dimension motivated by
a semantic distinction between event-central and entity-central statements. It
also shows a second dimension motivated by the following distinctions: 1) an
existential domain, 2) a presentational domain, 3) a mirative domain, and 4)
an exclamative domain. Several case studies illustrating the relationships
between the functions are presented. It is also demonstrated that miratives
can establish a distinction between unexpected and misexpected events. As for
exclamatives, it is shown that they are related to linguistic hedges that
convey the degree of membership of an item into a category. Several
neurobiological and psychological correlates are proposed: thetics correspond
to two types of awareness, whereas miratives and exclamatives are related to
different stages of a cognitive-evolutionary model of surprise.




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