Himalayan Linguistics

This paper explores the question of whether mirative meaning, in the sense of Aksu-Koç and Slobin’s (1986) “unprepared mind” and DeLancey (1997), is grammatically encoded in the Dardic language Shina. Mirativity marking in Shina’s linguistic neighbors is examined and compared with the situation in Shina. I find a clustering of what appears to be morphologically indicated mirativity in the eastern dialects of Shina, and identify two morphological strategies which can be employed to encode mirativity.