In Functional Discourse Grammar, as described in Hengeveld & Mackenzie (in press), mirativity is considered to be a basic illocution. According to Hengeveld et al. (2007: 78) the mirative differs from declarative illocution in that “it is not so much the content of the utterance itself that is being transmitted, but rather the emotional reaction of the speaker with respect to this content, in particular feelings such as surprise and delight.” The authors illustrate this point with the following example:

However, there are unambiguously mirative expressions that contradict this claim. Consider (2), where mirativity is expressed by means of a morphological marker, and (3) from Ecuadorian Spanish, where mirativity is expressed analytically by means of the present perfect form:

In both cases, it is the propositional content as well as the speaker’s surprise at this content that is being transmitted.Therefore, mirative expressions are in fact declarative utterances, i.e. utterances in which “S[peaker] instructs A[ddressee] to add the propositional content to his pragmatic information” (Dik 1997 I: 302). In addition, it seems more appropriate to consider the speaker’s surprise a reflection of the speaker’s knowledge status rather than considering it an “emotional reaction”, i.e. the speaker uses the mirative in order to indicate that s/he had no prior knowledge of the facts described. 

In my talk I will propose to account for mirativity as an operator modifying the communicative content at the interpersonal level, and to deal with the basic illocution of expressions of the type exemplified in (1) as exclamatives as does Dik (1997).