Miracles and mirativity: Lexical versus grammatical uses of wonder, marvel, and surprise

This paper focusses on constructions with nouns that denote something unexpected or astonishing. Specifically, it will compare constructions with marvel (1) and surprise (2) with those with wonder (3)-(4), which have been described in Van linden et al. (2016) and Gentens et al. (2016). The paper concentrates on constructions with complement clauses, cf. (1)-(4), and distinguishes between lexical vs. grammatical uses of complement-taking predicate (CTP) clauses (cf. Boye & Harder 2007).
(1) So drastic a series of atrocities worried even Lord Burleigh, who compared them with the much-condemned Spanish activities in the Low Countries: “as things be altered it is no marvel the people have rebellions here, for the Flemings had not so much cause to rebel by the oppression of the Spaniards, as is reported to the Irish people” (WB)
(2) Tyson soon integrated into that environment and the authorities misguidedly believed he was being rehabilitated thanks to boxing. And it was no surprise when Tyson was released early to go to live with D'Amato permanently. (WB)
(3) It is a wonder to me that no one is laughing at the silly boots, but I suppose they have other worries at the moment, and so do I. (WB)
(4) After all the scaremongering since September 11 regarding good versus evil, with us or with the terrorists, it is no wonder Arab-phobia has hit new heights. (WB)
In (4), it is no wonder functions as a mirative qualifier, commenting on the complement proposition in terms of its (un)expectedness (cf. DeLancey 2001). Its meaning can be paraphrased by an expectation adverb such as of course (Simon-Vandenbergen & Aijmer 2007: 172). The speaker’s lack of surprise about the proposition Arab-phobia has hit new heights is justified by the after-PP. While the CTP-clause thus serves a grammatical (attitudinal and discourse-organizational) function (Gentens et al. 2016) in (4), in (3) it expresses lexical meaning. The CTP-clause it is a wonder to me conveys that the speaker is very surprised, with the that-clause containing the presupposed factive proposition that s/he is surprised about (cf. Davidse & Van linden Forthc.). In (2), it was no surprise expresses the speaker’s lack of surprise about the proposition in the when-complement. Note, however, that – unlike in (4) – this expression of lack of surprise is discourse-primary (e.g. it can be ‘addressed’ by ‘how much of a surprise was it?’) and thus shows lexical use (cf. Boye & Harder 2007). In (1) it is no marvel functions as a mirative qualifier in a rhetorical scheme similar to (4).
Using the British subcorpora of the Wordbanks Online corpus (WB), we will analyse 250 concordances of (no) marvel and surprise + complement clause, aiming for a qualitative and quantitative comparison with (no) wonder constructions (e.g. lexical vs. grammatical use, matrix predicate types (it BE/COME…), rhetorical schemata). In this way we hope to get a more fine-grained view of what seems to be a mirative paradigm in present-day English.
References
Boye, K. and P. Harder. 2007. Complement-taking Predicates: Usage and Linguistic Structure. Studies in Language, 31: 569–606.
Davidse, Kristin & An Van linden. Forthcoming. Revisiting ‘it-extraposition’: The historical development of constructions with matrices (it)/(there) be + NP followed by a complement clause. In Paloma Núñez-Pertejo, María José López-Couso, Belén-Méndez Naya & Javier Pérez-Guerra (eds.), Crossing Linguistic Boundaries: Systemic, Synchronic and Diachronic Variation in English. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
DeLancey, Scott. 2001. The mirative and evidentiality. Journal of Pragmatics 33(3): 369-382.
Gentens, Caroline, Ditte Kimps, Kristin Davidse, Gilles Jacobs, An Van linden & Lot Brems. 2016. Mirativity and rhetorical structure: The development and prosody of disjunct and anaphoric adverbials with ‘no’ wonder. In Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer & Arne Lohmann (eds.), Outside the Clause. Form and function of extra-clausal constituents [Studies in Language Companion Series 178], 125-156. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Simon-Vandenbergen & Karin Aijmer. 2007. The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty: A Corpus-based Study of English Adverbs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Van linden, An, Kristin Davidse & Lennart Matthijs. 2016. Miracles and mirativity: From lexical it’s a wonder to grammaticalised it’s no wonder in Old English. Leuvense Bijdragen – Leuven Contributions in Linguistics and Philology 99-100: 385-409.

Corpus
Collins Wordbanks Online corpus: https://wordbanks.harpercollins.co.uk/