On the interaction of some mirative markers in Italian

This paper explores the syntactic and semantic properties of some mirative strategies in Italian, and their possibility to co-occur without producing any redundancy in the utterance. By proposing a specific setting and an event that triggers the speaker's unprepared mind, we analyse the nature of some (syntactic) markers used to convey mirativity, from Ethical and Conversational Datives, to GO and TAKE periphrases, to the expletive negation within a rhetorical question, first individually and then in some combinations. We build a featural geometry to explain why markers of different origins can yield a mirative interpretation. We assign a +ZONAL feature to the markers in question, which represents a semantic space tied to the speaker's expectations. Lastly, we investigate the issue of why mirative obliques might be featurally more complex than other markers. We conclude that the acceptable stackability of two or more mirative markers depends on the fact that mirativity is a pragmatic inference arising as a byproduct of the manipulation of the speaker's expectations.