ABSTRACT
It has been widely acknowledged that the no (da) construction in Japanese has a wide range of uses. This works aims to provide an adequate semantic description of one of the major uses of no (da), which has been labeled as the “discovery,” “grasping,” or “comprehension” use by Japanese grammarians (as in, A, koko ni ita n da ‘Oh, there you are’), in light of the recent discussion of the notion of mirativity (“linguistic marking of an utterance as conveying information which is new or unexpected to the speaker”; DeLancey 2001) in the typological literature. I argue that no (da) in its “discovery” use can sensibly be regarded as a mirative maker and further discuss some subtle aspects of its meaning that do not automatically follow from its being a mirative marker.
