Word.ws English Dictionary

mirative

Syllables: mi·rat·ive/ˈmɪɹətɪv/

mirative noun: a grammatical mood that expresses (surprise at) unexpected revelations or new information.

Noun

mirative (countable and uncountable, plural miratives)

  1. (uncountable) A grammatical mood that expresses (surprise at) unexpected revelations or new information.
    • Although the Maidu 'evidential' -wéw (Shipley 1964:45) might correspond somewhat to the Washo visual, and the (unexemplified) Sierra Miwok 'circumstantial evidence' marker taˀ, tat, ˀiš- (Freeland 1951:169) may correspond to the Washo inferential (mirative).1986, Wallace [L.] Chafe, Johanna Nichols, editors, Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation, →ISBN, footnote 7, page 8
    • In Archi mirativity is grammaticalized as part of the verbal category of evidentiality, so the study of the mirative in Nakh-Daghestanian languages might help to identify the meaning of exclamatives more precisely.2011, Elena Kalinina, “Exclamative Clauses in the Languages of the North Caucasus and the Problem of Finiteness”, in Gilles Authier, Timur Maisak, editors, Tense, Aspect, Modality and Finiteness in...
  2. (countable) (An instance of) a form of a word which conveys this mood.
    • [T]he speaker had heard on the radio that a bear had attacked a woman. From the description of her wounds on the radio, he infers, using the mirative/inferential particle lą̄ą̄, that she was dragged by the bear. […] This particle also implies that the speaker was surprised at the event. Bear...2003, Willem J. de Reuse, “Evidentiality in Western Apache (Athabaskan)”, in Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon, editors, Studies in Evidentiality (Typological Studies in Language; 54)...
    • He [Timothy Jowan Curnow] points out that miratives are very rare with first person, more common with second, and most common with third person. In all cases, however, non-miratives are more common than miratives.2018, Gwendolyn Hyslop, “Mirativity and Egophoricity in Kurtöp”, in Simeon Floyd, Elisabeth Norcliffe, Lila San Roque, editors, Egophoricity (Typological Studies in Language; 118), Amsterdam...

Adjective

mirative (not comparable)

  1. Of or relating to the mirative mood.
    • The prefinal suffix -áʔyiʔ Mirative indicates that the speaker knows of the action described by the verb, not having observed it occur, but only inferentially from observation of its effects. It thus commonly conveys an emotion of surprise.1964, William Horton Jacobsen, Jr., “The Prefinal Suffixes”, in A Grammar of the Washo Language (unpublished Ph.D. in Linguistics dissertation), Berkeley, Calif.: University of California, Berkeley...
    • In the first in-depth analysis of a mirative construction which I am aware of, discussing the Turkish "evidential" perfect, Slobin & Aksu (1983; see also Aksu-Koç & Slobin 1986) give a unified characterization of the category as marking that the speaker's mind was "not prepared" for the information...1997, Scott DeLancey, “Mirativity: The Grammatical Marking of Unexpected Information”, in Linguistic Typology, volume 1, Berlin; New York, N.Y.: Mouton de Gruyter, →ISSN, page 36

Examples of mirative in a sentence

  • The Mirative can also be used in recounting dreams[…].2013, Willem F. H. Adelaar, “A Quechuan Mirative?”, in Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Anne Storch, editors, Perception and Cognition in Language...
  • In fact, lą̄ą̄ is more fundamentally a mirative than an inferential, […]2003, Willem J. de Reuse, “Evidentiality in Western Apache (Athabaskan)”, in Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon, editors, Studies in...
  • This is why a noneyewitness evidentiality specification in a two-term system and an inferential evidential in a three-term system may acquire a mirative extension.2003, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, “Evidentiality in Typological Perspective”, in Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon, editors, Studies in...

Antonyms of mirative

  • non-mirative

Forms of mirative

pluralmiratives

Origin of mirative

Possibly from (ad)mirative, from French admiratif (“tending to admire”) (used by French diplomat and scholar Auguste Dozon (1822–1890), imitating the use of the Ancient Greek ἀπροσδόκητος (aprosdókētos, “unexpected”) in a similar context by Albanian translator and scholar Kostandin Kristoforidhi (1826–1895)), from Latin admīrārī, present active infinitive of admīror (“to admire, respect; to be astonished, to be surprised at”), from ad- (“to”) + mīror (“to admire, marvel at; to be amazed or astonished at”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *smey- (“to be glad, laugh”)).

Words formed from mirative

Questions about mirative

What does mirative mean?
Mirative means a grammatical mood that expresses (surprise at) unexpected revelations or new information.
How do you use mirative in a sentence?
The Mirative can also be used in recounting dreams[…].
What part of speech is mirative?
Mirative can be a noun or an adjective.
How do you pronounce mirative?
Mirative is pronounced /ˈmɪɹətɪv/ (UK).
What is the plural of mirative?
The plural of mirative is miratives.

Words near mirative in the dictionary

  1. mirated
  2. mirates
  3. mirating
  4. miration
  5. mirations
  6. mirative
  7. miratively
  8. miratives
  9. mirativity
  10. Miraumont
  11. miravirsen

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mirative (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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