Mirativity and exclamatives in functional discourse grammar: evidence from Spanish

This paper is a critical evaluation of the FDG claim that Mirativity is a Basic Illocution
(cf. e.g. Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008). The view presented here is that Mirativity is a
semantic concept, while "Mirative Illocution" is in fact Exclamative Illocution. On the
basis of data from Ecuadorian Highland Spanish, which has both a grammaticalized
Mirative and a grammaticalized Exclamative, it is shown that there are a number of
systematic differences between Mirative and Exclamative utterances. The paper ends
with an alternative proposal of how to account for these two concepts within FDG.