ABSTRACT
Similar to many descriptions of miratives cross-linguistically, Schachter and Otanes’s (1972) classic descriptive grammar of Tagalog describes the second-position particle pala as “expressing mild surprise at new information, or an unexpected event or situation.” Drawing on recent work on mirativity in other languages, however, we show that this characterization needs to be refined in two ways. First, we show that while pala can be used in cases of surprise, pala itself merely encodes the speaker’s sudden revelation with the counterexpectational nature of surprise arising pragmatically or from other aspects of the sentence, such as other particles and focus. Second, we present data from imperatives and interrogatives, arguing that this revelation need not concern “information” per se but rather the illocutionary update the sentence encodes. Finally, we explore the interactions between pala and other elements which express mirativity in some way and/or interact with the mirativity pala expresses.
