A mirative connector in Kamas

The article is about a conditional converb form of the Kamas verb ku- ‘see, find’, which appears in the older Kamas texts in “pre-mirative sequences” (Skribnik 2023), i.e. in contexts, where a new scene, or a new detail within a given scene, is introduced from the perspective of a salient protagonist. In the same context may also appear a finite vision verb, or no vision verb at all. All three variants are understood as representing a narrative pattern, whereby the variants with an explicit vision verb enhance perceptional identification with the protagonist. The variant with the conditional converb is more frequent than the finite variant, and it has an areal parallel in South Siberian Turkic. It is argued that it is preferred in order to soften the transition between past-tense based narration and a present-tense based existential clause. Further it is argued that the Kamas form was grammaticalizing into a mirative connecting adverbial, which is in complementary distribution with the general Kamas connector dĭgǝttǝ ‘then’. Mirative operators in Uralic are usually adverbials or participle-based clauses; with the Kamas form, connectors are added to this class of functional operators.