[SynSem] Arhonto Terzi (U. Patras)

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Arhonto Terzi (U. Patras)

On the acquisition of syntactically encoded evidentiality

The term evidentiality refers to encoding in language the source of information associated with an utterance. It has preoccupied the acquisition literature because it seems to be acquired late and, most importantly, because it appears that production precedes its comprehension in child language. Previous studies have proposed that the comprehension lag, regardless of whether the language encodes evidentiality morphologically or syntactically, is due to factors such as others’ authority or mental perspective, where “others” stands for other individuals involved in the experiment in various manners (e.g., the experimenter or someone in the props).

The comprehension study to be reported in this talk has taken the aforementioned factors into consideration in its investigation of a large number of Greek-speaking children. Results showed that children align with adults in mapping source of evidence to sentence type at around the age of 9, suggesting additional factors as responsible for late acquisition.

We argue that these factors are grammatical and arise to a large extent when evidentiality is encoded in the syntax.