This study aims to analyze Spanish mirativity construction. Mirativity refers to the linguistic marking of an utterance that represents an information which is new or unexpected to the speaker. Therefore, mirative constructions show the speaker's emotional state, that is to say, surprise. There are many means that could express speaker's surprise, such as exclamatory expressions, admirative tone, etc. However, in this paper I attempt to investigate the existence in Spanish of a mirative form that could be recognized as a grammatical category. In Korean, there is a modal suffix, for example, ‘-ne’, ‘-gun(a)’, which expresses surprise and new information. In Spanish, the verbal past tense and perfect aspect, such as imperfect, present perfect, pluperfect, could be used to represent mirativity in the present. I argue that Spanish tense and aspect should be recognized as a grammatical category that express mirativity. Furthermore, I attempt to analyze a derivational process of the mirative constructions comparing with the exclamative constructions.

• 유은정(한국외국어대학교)