Understanding different sources of information: the acquisition of evidentiality

Abstract

This paper investigates six- to nine-year-old children's acquisition of evidentiality. In two minimally different tasks we assess whether children can be made to use a particular source of information by presenting them with a specific evidential term. That is, we assess whether children have an explicit awareness of the source requirement of the evidential terms. The results demonstrate that children explicitly understand the direct evidential term, but not the indirect evidential terms. Interestingly, the direct evidential term tested (Dutch lijken) does not encode high speaker certainty. Hence, even though the child cannot rely on speaker certainty to provide an answer, the results still show that direct evidentiality is acquired before indirect evidentiality.

The Acquisition of Syntactically Encoded Evidentiality

“…In other words, early attention to evidence source does not depend on having a language with obligatory, morphologically encoded evidentiality. Indeed, our results are in line with claims by Papafragou et al (2007), Gleitman & Papafragou (2005), and Koring & De Mulder (2011), who argue that the conceptual framework for marking linguistic evidentiality is in place at a relatively young age and not subject to much language-specific variation.…”

“…Much of the previous work on the acquisition of evidentiality has focused 15 Koring & De Mulder (2011) and Koring (2012) report that Dutch children acquire the reportative evidential verb schijnen ('seem/is said') before the inferential evidential verb ljkt me ('seems to me/I infer'), in contrast to the order observed in Quechua and Turkish. A possible explanation for this difference is that the Dutch experiment required inferences based on mental reasoning (e.g., The cookie is missing.…”

“…Virtually all of the previous research on acquisition of evidentiality has examined languages in which evidentiality is grammaticized in the morphological system (but see Koring & De Mulder 2011 for a study of Dutch evidential verbs). A central focus of many of these studies is the child's mastery of direct and indirect evidential markers in relation to his development in other cognitive areas presumably involved in use and understanding of evidentials.…”

Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis of Evidentiality in PHD Dissertations

“…Evidentiality as a linguistic system is studied from diff erent perspectives, such as the acquisition of evidentiality in various languages (Aksu-Koç 1988, O'Neill & Atance 2000, Ifantidou 2005, Fitneva 2008, Oztürk 2008, Jeschull & Roeper 2009, Aydın & Ceci 2009, Rett & Hyams 2014, Koring & De Mulder 2015; the use of evidentiality in a variety of genres in diff erent languages, such as English newspapers (Bednarek 2006), diachronic analysis of newspaper articles from 1993-2005 (Clark 2010), the aspect of illocution (Sbisa 2014), Chinese newspaper reports in terms of subjectivity and objectivity (Hsieh 2008), Greek cultural characteristics and academic writing (Koutsantoni 2005), English academic discourse (Fetzer 2014, Yang 2014, a comparative study of the use of research articles by Chinese and English native speakers (Yang 2012), and reporting evidentials in English research articles (Yang 2013) (see also Fetzer & Oishi 2014). There is also research, albeit relatively more limited in number, which analyzes evidentiality in spoken data (interview corpus in French-English bilingual discourse in King & Nadasdi 1999, telephone conversations in Korean in Kim 2005, political debates in English in Berlin & Prieto-Mendoza 2014).…”

Evidentiality

“…In Indo-European languages, grammaticalized evidential marking with bound forms is unusual. However, there is an extensive literature concerning other kinds of information source expressions (e.g., lexical or constructional forms) in European languages (e.g., Chafe 1986, de Haan 2000, Fox 2001, Squartini 2007, Diewald & Smirnova 2010, Koring & de Mulder 2015, Arrese et al 2017, Foolen et al 2018.…”