Declarative Mirativity in Urdu: A Lexico-cognitive Account

Abstract

The present study seeks to characterize the strategic realization of mirativity as a semantic category with an empirical focus on Urdu language. The study addresses the research question: How do declaratives become miratives? The question aims to elaborate the semantic composition which enables hearer to suspend the basic communicative function of declarative clause type and process it as a linguistic strategy to reach informational characterization peculiar to miratives. To address this question, the present study uses Evan’s (2009) the Lexical Concept and Cognitive Model (LCCM) as its theoretical underpinnings. This framework uses the constructs of Lexical Concept and Cognitive Model to account for the mechanisms of semantic composition for polysemous phenomena. The present work combines the LCCM theory with Gras et al.’s (2021) ‘phonological construction’ to account for the strategic realization of mirative meaning in Urdu. The study uses multiple data sources such as naturally occurring data, individual and dialogical introspections and Urdu Lughat. The study finds that to serve as miratives, declarative clauses undergo the processes of lexical concept selection, integration and interpretation for their final information characterization. Overall, the study implicates that meaning construction is a function of distinct types of information: linguistic content, conceptual content and contextual content, and the semantic compositional processes involved (selection, integration and interpretation) occur in tandem and recursively. The study concludes that a cluse type is polysemous in nature, and its pragmatic functions result from construal imposed on its content.