Evidentiality in Uzbek and Kazakh

5.1.1 Admirativity: Emotivity and Non-Confirmativity 
Of the various non-evidential functions of the morpheme that express evidential meaning, 
admirativity is perhaps the best studied, especially in the context of the Eurasian evidentiality 
belt, where it is a frequent second meaning of the so-called evidential form of the verb. 
Admirativity, which is sometimes also referred to as mirativity, was first defined as the linguistic 
expression of “unexpected information”, and was first described as a phenomenon in Albanian 
(Dozon 1879). This definition continued in the Balkan linguistic literature (Friedman 1981) and 
has continued to be used through the present (DeLancey 1997). In more formal terms, 
admirativity can be defined in terms of a proposition P: “P, and the speaker did not expect P” 
(Plungian 2001, 355). 
There has been a considerable amount of debate over the status of admirativity as a 
verbal category. In the languages they study, Friedman (1988) and Lazard (1999) argue that 

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admirativity is an extension of evidential meaning, and therefore should not be placed in its own 
category. Plungian (2001) places admirativity within the category of 
MODALITY
or 
STATUS
, as it 
has less to do with source of information and more to do with speaker attitude, but notes that the 
connection between admirativity and evidentiality is logical when languages exhibit only a two-
way (direct vs. indirect) distinction in evidentiality, as both the indirect evidential and 
admiratives express low levels of speaker confidence. On the basis of data from Tibetan and 
Hare, DeLancey (1997; 2001) claims that admirativity merits the status of a category, as in Hare, 
admirativity is expressed in a separate part of the verbal paradigm from evidentiality. 
Whether or not one considers 
MODALITY 
a separate category, the connections among it, 
EVIDENTIALITY
, and 
STATUS
/
MODALITY
are quite clear. Plungian’s (2001) assessment of 
admirativity and (non-firsthand) evidentiality as having to do with low levels of speaker 
confidence can be related to the notion of 
NON
-
CONFIRMATIVITY
that was first proposed by 
Aronson (1967) and expanded upon by Friedman (1978; 1980, etc.). In the previous chapter, we 
established that the marking of non-firsthand information source, a type of evidential meaning in 
Uzbek and Kazakh, was dependent upon the marking of non-confirmativity. This other meaning 
of ekan/eken, the expression of 
ADMIRATIVITY
, can also be related to non-confirmativity. If we 
posit that the primary meaning of ekan/eken is non-confirmativity, then the use of these 
morphemes describing either past or non-visible events results in a non-firsthand information 
source (or evidential) reading. When these morphemes are employed to describe events that the 
speaker has clearly just witnessed, however, the combination of non-confirmativity and clear, 
first-hand information produces the ironic, surprised, unexpected, or otherwise 
EMOTIVE
meanings ascribed to admirative utterances (see Darden 1977 for a similar analysis of 

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Bulgarian). The relationship between evidential, admirative/emotive, and non-confirmative 
meaning will be further discussed in the final section of this chapter.