Vietniekvārdi TAS / TĀDS / ŠIS / ŠITAS / ŠITĀDS un pārsteiguma izteikšana latviešu valodā
Pronouns TAS / TĀDS / ŠIS / ŠITAS / ŠITĀDS ‘that’ and expression of mirative in Latvian

Summary/Abstract: In Latvian, both verbs and interjections are used when expressing mirative, while in Latvian language corpora (e.g. „The Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian” LVK2018 and LVK2022, „Corpus of News Portal Comments”, „Corpus of Texts Written by Rainis”, „Common Crawl of Latvian 2020”, etc.), literary works, as well as in spoken language, pronouns are the most common in mirative constructions, including the indicative pronouns, such as tas, tāds, šis, šitas, šitāds ‘that’. Furthermore, the language shows that mirativity can also occur simultaneously with other grammatical categories, including modality, evidentiality and aspectuality (see DeLancey 1997, 34). When expressing mirative with the indicative pronouns, the surprise can be both positive, while materializing together with joy, happiness and wonder, and negative, which mostly materializes together either with sarcasm or irony. In mirative constructions with the indicative pronouns, there is a whole set of meanings that complement each other, i.e. verbs, particles and interjections have also been used to emphasize the constructions. The language material shows that negative, ironic, or sarcastic semantics occur in evidential constructions with mirative that contain indicative pronouns (tas, tāds, šis, šitas, šitāds ‘that’). To reinforce negative surprise, personal pronouns are often used in constructions to specifically emphasize a particular person. The constructions mainly express surprise at situations that the author of the text has not previously thought of.

• Details
• Contents