Mirativity on the Table

Abstract

Using the Hindi-Urdu discourse particle lo as a case study, the present paper models mirativity within the Table model framework (Farkas & Roelofsen, 2017). This comes with an enrichment of the Table model; we propose the discourse structure to encode, in addition to discourse commitments, the time these commitments are publicized. We also incorporate a component that contains the public record of private beliefs. With these two additions, we seek to capture mirativity in the Table model, emphasizing recency as a condition for surprise and underlining the need and the conceptual difficulty of incorporating private beliefs in a public scoreboard of conversation. We show that the difficulty can be overcome to fulfill the modeling need.