Expressing surprise by particles

The aim of this paper is to investigate some grammaticalised expressions of surprise, four mirative particles of English: even, only, already and still. It shows where and how the proposed account of mirativity improves the semantic/pragmatic analysis of the four particles. The paper tries to deal with the question whether the analysis motivated does not lead to too much surprise in natural language. It turns out to be possible in all four cases to maintain the line that the particle means one thing and the host another (the host influences the meaning of the particle by supplying antecedents, the particle may disambiguate the host) and that the two meanings are just merged, as if they were separate utterances.The analyses of particles in this paper illustrates the general point that language interpretation is rather holistic and that formal models of interpretation should reflect this, as in the updated semantics.