Topic: mirative polarity selection

Mirative markers, such as “surprisingly”, are linguistic elements that encode a violation of expectations (Delancey, 1997, 2012; Aikhenvald, 2012). Such markers are used for expectation management during communication, informing the listener about an upcoming unexpected message. Sensitivity to mirative markers relies on two abilities: i) updating expectations upon recognizing a mirative marker, and ii) identifying expectation violations warranting the use of a mirative marker. The aim of this study is to quantify and compare sensitivity to mirative markers in humans and large language models (