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A LEXICO-COGNITIVE ACCOUNT OF MIRATIVITY IN URDU
(UMT, Lahore, 2023) JABIR HUSSAIN
Languages vary in the use of grammatical categories as well as strategies to realize meaning categories. Languages having no grammatical markers use different strategies, that is, they use available forms to encode meanings other than the prototypical ones. In terms of the semantics of understanding a hearer constructs for the text that a speaker produces, the question arises as to how the hearer constructs the situated meaning evoked through linguistic strategies rather than grammatical categories. The present study seeks to characterize explicitly the strategic realization of mirativity as a semantic category, with an empirical focus on Urdu language which, in the absence of morphological marking, employs various strategies for mirative meaning. The study concerns clause types and addresses two research questions: (a) How do declaratives become miratives? and (b) How do interrogatives become miratives? The questions aim to elaborate the semantic composition which enables hearer to suspend the basic communicative functions of clause types and process them as linguistic strategies to reach informational characterization peculiar to miratives.