The place of exclamatives and miratives in grammar: a functional discourse grammar view

The concept of mirativity has come to interfere in the recently developed framework of Functional Discourse Grammar with what would be considered to be exclamative elsewhere. In addition, the concept of exclamative itself turns out to be ill-defined in various studies within the functional paradigm. The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic description of the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic differences between miratives and exclamatives, and propose a way in which these differences can be accounted for within Functional Discourse Grammar. This study is mainly based on data from Ecuadorian Highland Spanish; crucial claims will be supported with additional data from other languages.