The volume edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique constitutes a valuable contribution to the study of mirativity in Romance linguistics, particularly in Italo- and Ibero-Romance, since it addresses aspects that have thus far remained underexplored, and further enhances the definition of mirativity by extending it to encompass the hearer of the utterance.
The volume, which is best suited to an expert audience, starts with a comprehensive overview of the theoretical foundations of mirativity, positioning it within the broader domains of evidentiality, modality, and exclamativity. The emergence of the category from classic typological work (Aksu-Koç & Slobin Reference Aksu-Koç, Slobin, Chafe and Nichols1986, DeLancey Reference DeLancey1997, Reference DeLancey2001, Aikhenvald Reference Aikhenvald2012) is traced, emphasising the defining core notion of the speaker’s unprepared mind in the face of new or counter-expectational information. Crucially, the conceptual difficulty of keeping mirativity distinct from evidentiality (especially inferential evidentials), from exclamation (especially in Indo-European languages), and from related semantic notions such as adversativity and concessivity is underlined. The introduction also provides a detailed theoretical map that clarifies not only the essence of mirativity but also the ways it surfaces cross-linguistically (sometimes by use of grammaticalised items, sometimes through lexical or prosodic strategies; cf. Peterson Reference Peterson2017). Finally, it situates Romance languages as a fruitful testing ground for the category, noting their abundant but often subtle mirative strategies, and frames the volume as an interdisciplinary effort to refine, test and challenge the boundaries of mirativity through morphosyntax, prosody, semantics, historical linguistics and discourse studies.
Structurally, the rest of the book is organised in four sections. The first part addresses the mirative meaning triggered by certain grammar constituents. The second part concerns the mirative reading of various types of questions. The volume continues with a section devoted to the idea that the concept of ‘contrary-to-expectations’ can create fuzzy boundaries with other categories, such as concessivity. The final part explores the overall boundaries of mirativity in different senses, including its differentiation from exclamativity, and the revision of perspective.
The first part opens with the contribution by Ricardo Maldonado and Juliana De la Mora, who investigate how Spanish middle se constructions can convey mirative meaning. The authors argue that beyond their well-known generic or dispositional interpretations, middle se clauses also license readings in which the described situation is unexpected relative to the speaker’s assumptions. Analysing 962 examples from 2 oral Mexican Spanish corpora, they found that 36% of middle se uses correspond to mirative readings (350 cases). This mirative value emerges from the interaction of the middle voice with contextual inferences about agentivity, controllability and event evaluation. Spanish middle se systematically reduces agentive control and presents events as non-canonical, a property that facilitates mirative reinterpretations. When the event deviates from normative expectations, the middle form foregrounds the speaker’s reduced control and highlights the surprising outcome. Prosody and discourse factors amplify mirativity: speakers often combine middle se with evaluative adverbs, modal particles or exclamative contours. The chapter also examines restrictions: not all middles are mirative, and mirativity depends on pragmatic enrichment rather than on dedicated morphology. Spanish middle se is thus placed as a mirative strategy rather than a grammatical mirative marker, showing how general voice morphology can enter the mirative domain when contextual assumptions about control and expectation are manipulated.
Chapter 3 by Alda Mari turns to the Italian particle mica (lit. ‘crumb’), traditionally associated with negation, and shows that in surprise-oriented future questions, mica functions as a disconfirmational mirative particle. It does not merely encode negation or polarity, but rather signals a speaker’s sense of violated expectation: an inference that should have held in general circumstances is unexpectedly contradicted in the present situation. Mari ties this phenomenon to the semantics of biased questions, which often presuppose prior expectations, evidential support or contextual assumptions. She argues that mica retrieves a defeasible inference and marks its breakdown, situating the particle within a continuum that spans mirativity, evidentiality, epistemic modality and concessivity. Her analysis reveals the fine-grained overlap between mirativity and the expression of epistemic misalignment in Italian and illustrates how even an element canonically viewed as a negative polarity item can develop sophisticated discourse-pragmatic uses that encode surprise, counter-expectation and stance-taking.
José Luis Cifuentes Honrubia’s chapter opens the second part of the volume and offers a meticulous analysis of Spanish interrogative constructions containing santo ‘saint’ and cuento ‘tale’, and cuenta ‘account’, showing how these forms have evolved from lexical expressions into highly specialised mirative and refutational interrogatives. Through historical and synchronic data, he traces how originally lexical nouns, such as cuento developed into discourse markers expressing strong incredulity, rejection, and disalignment with the proposition at hand. Although these constructions share key features with mirativity, such as the reference to counter-expectation, the author emphasises that they do not express surprise, but rather occupy a semantic space characterised primarily by argumentative refutation (disagreement and rejection). His nuanced treatment reveals how Spanish has recruited lexical material into highly expressive interrogatives that serve to challenge assumptions, rebut statements, or foreground unexpectedness, thereby enriching the typology of Romance mirative strategies.
Chapter 5 by Susana Rodríguez Rosique examines the Spanish particle cómo when used not as an interrogative adverb but as a mirative exclamative, roughly equivalent to English ‘What?!’ or ‘How come?!’ She demonstrates that this non-interrogative cómo has undergone functional specialisation, behaving more like an interjection that expresses sudden shock, disbelief, or realisation. Through syntactic tests, prosodic observations and discourse diagnostics, she shows that mirative cómo is incompatible with standard interrogative syntax and does not seek information; instead, it flags an unexpected proposition that has just become salient. The chapter significantly advances the understanding of how a wh-element can shift from interrogative to mirative particle, broadening the inventory of Romance mirative markers and reinforcing the idea that mirativity in Spanish relies on lexically grounded but structurally conventionalised strategies.
Chapter 6 by Carolina González and Lara Reglero provides an empirical, acoustic analysis of wh-in-situ questions in Spanish, showing that when these structures receive a mirative interpretation, they display a distinct and systematic prosodic signature. They demonstrate that mirative wh-in-situ questions differ from informational ones in pitch movement, syllabic prominence, boundary tones, and global contour shape. These prosodic differences encode a speaker’s astonishment or emotional stance towards the proposition, allowing the listener to infer the speaker’s surprise even in the absence of syntactic marking. Their findings provide strong evidence for the claim that Romance mirativity can be encoded purely through intonational means, without requiring dedicated morphology. This chapter thus constitutes an important contribution to the phonetics-pragmatics interface, highlighting the role of prosody as an independent locus of mirative meaning.
The contribution by Caterina Mauri and Antonia Russo explores the Italian construction altro che ‘other than’, offering a deep diachronic and semantic analysis showing how this expression evolved from a comparative idiom to an adversative and eventually mirative marker. The authors argue that altro che now frequently conveys surprise at the invalidation of an expected proposition, making it a prototypical example of what they call second-level mirativity, i.e. surprise not merely at a fact, but at the failure of a presupposed expectation. Their historical reconstruction reveals how evaluative, contrastive, and corrective uses layered over time to yield a construction capable of signalling counter-expectation, irony and emphatic rejection. This chapter provides a crucial case study of how repeated adversative uses can conventionalise into mirative constructions, showing one of the pathways through which languages expand their mirative repertoire.
Chapter 8 by Giulio Scivoletto investigates the semantic trajectory of the Sicilian particle bì, which originated from an imperative of the verb ‘see’ (vidì) and has since evolved into a discourse marker expressing surprise, shock, or objection. He demonstrates how bì shifted away from perception to function as an interactional tool used in storytelling, reactions, and conversational negotiation. Not only does this particle express mirativity but it also frequently operates as a corrective marker, signalling disagreement or reorientation in discourse. By documenting its pragmatic environments and social distribution, Scivoletto reveals how cooptation mechanisms, i.e. the repurposing of sentence-internal material for discourse use, can create new mirative elements in Romance varieties. The study thus adds an important Italo-Romance perspective on how vernacular markers develop into conventionalised carriers of surprise.
The contribution by Cristina Sánchez López starts the final section of the volume and contains a re-evaluation of Spanish nominal exclamatives. The author argues that although these structures are expressive and evaluative, they should not be automatically classified as mirative, since many nominal exclamatives express emotional intensity, evaluation, or speaker stance without necessarily encoding surprise or counter-expectation. By disentangling the domains of mirativity and exclamation, Sánchez López demonstrates that exclamatives can highlight degrees, affect, or speaker involvement without marking the unprepared mind. Her careful analysis contributes to refining the typology of exclamatives in Romance and clarifies the limits of mirativity as a semantic category, preventing its overextension and reinforcing the conceptual distinctions discussed in the book’s introduction.
The following chapter by Sarah Dessì Schmid, Lydia Momma and Evelyn Wiesinger tackles a central but often overlooked distinction, answering the question: whose expectations are violated in mirativity? The authors present a rich corpus-based comparison of Spanish and Italian mirative markers, showing that some constructions encode speaker-oriented surprise, while others highlight hearer-oriented unexpectedness or even character-oriented mirativity within narratives. By reframing mirativity as a perspectival phenomenon, they underscore that ‘newness’ or ‘surprise’ must be interpreted relative to a specific cognitive agent. Their work significantly broadens the theoretical scope of the category by demonstrating that Romance languages support multiple mirative orientations and that this orientation affects syntactic distribution, pragmatic function and discourse interpretation.
The book ends with the contribution by Hans-Jörg Döhla, who tackles the topics of bilingualism and contact linguistics by examining the polysemic marker ra’e in Paraguayan Guaraní and its incorporation into Paraguayan Spanish. He shows that ra’e can serve as a recent-past marker, an indirect evidential, and a mirative marker, encoding the speaker’s sudden realisation or newly acquired knowledge. Through detailed comparison, he reveals how Spanish spoken in bilingual contexts has incorporated this polyfunctional marker, thereby creating a hybrid evidential-mirative system not found in monolingual Spanish varieties. The chapter illustrates how language contact can yield innovative mirative expressions, blurring the lines between tense, evidentiality and mirativity. This contribution underscores the role of bilingual ecologies in expanding or reshaping mirative categories.
Overall, the volume offers a coherent and multifaceted contribution to the study of mirativity in Romance languages, although only data from Spanish, Italian and Sicilian are discussed, with just cursory hints at Catalan, French, Portuguese and Romanian, and no mention of, e.g. Sardinian. Despite the heterogeneity of approaches, ranging from morphosyntax and semantics to prosody, discourse analysis and diachrony, the volume succeeds in showing that ‘unexpectedness’ in Romance is encoded through a rich set of strategies rather than through dedicated morphology. A unifying thread across the chapters is the careful examination of counter-expectation as a gradient phenomenon, often situated at the intersection of evidentiality, modality, and expressivity. Particularly valuable is the systematic attention to perspective, which reveals that mirativity may be anchored to the speaker, the hearer or a narrative character, thereby broadening the theoretical scope of the category. By integrating detailed empirical studies with refined theoretical reflections, the volume demonstrates that Romance languages constitute an ideal testing ground for mirative effects and significantly advances our understanding of how surprise is structured and conveyed across grammatical and discourse levels.
