Abstract : The current article considers the linguistic representation of surprise in English within the frameowork of the Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations. English appears not to have any markers specialised in the expression of surprise. Here I argue that English does nonetheless possess numerous formal configurations which may be shown to derive from a recurrent schema of surprise. I consider three such configurations: the concessive YET, OF ALL + plural noun and ONLY TO + verb in narrative context. Each configuration mobilises an abstract schema involving a discontinuity between an anticipated situation and an actual situation, i.e. an opposition between a -- retroactively re-constructed -- virtual class of expected possibilities and a validated occurrence.
