Cover not available
Part of
Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development: Studies in honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koç
Edited by F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı Özyürek
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 21] 2017
► pp. 113–132

Chapter 8
Evidentiality, questions and the reflection principle in Tibetan

What do children learn when they learn about evidentiality?

| Smith College, U.S.A.
| Smith College, U.S.A.
Evidentials fall in the borderland between traditional semantics and pragmatics. A situation semantics for evidentials helps to explain their puzzling developmental pathway in children. Drawing on our work in Tibetan, we argue that there is no necessity for a child to master Theory of Mind, that is, awareness of others' mental states, in order to make or to understand assertions that carry evidential force. The meaning of evidentials does not make reference to states of knowledge of persons, but rather encodes relations between discourse, evidence and evaluation situations. On the other hand, when a Tibetan speaker asks a question, the form of the evidential used in the question must anticipate the kind of knowledge the interlocutor can access in reply. Full mastery of questions in Tibetan-speaking children does require attention to and representation of others' states of knowledge and belief.
Keywords: evidentials, Tibetan, questions, Theory of Mind, semantics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overview of the Tibetan evidential system
  • 3.Evidentiality and acquisition challenges
  • 4.Tibetan evidentials and maternal-child speech
  • 5.The semantics of evidentials
  • 6.The reflection principle for questions
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.08vil
References (38)
References
Aikhenvald, A.. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Aksu, A. A.. 1978. Aspect and Modality in the Child's Acquisition of the Turkish Past Tense. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Aksu- Koç, A.. 1988. The Acquisition of Aspect and Modality: The Case of Past Reference in Turkish. Cambridge: CUP.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aksu-Koc, A. & Alıcı, D. M.. 2000. Understanding sources of beliefs and marking of uncertainty: the child’s theory of evidentiality. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Child Language Research Forum, E. V. Clark (ed.), 123–30. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Apperly, I. A. & Butterfill, S. A.. 2009. Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states? Psychological Review 116(4): 953–970.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Astington, J. W.. 2000. Language and metalanguage in children's understanding of mind. In Minds in the Making: Essays in Honor of David R. Olson, J. W. Astington (ed.), 267–284. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Astington, J. W. & Baird, J. A.. 2005. Representational development and false-belief understanding. In Why Language Matters for Theory of Mind, J. W. Astington & J. A. Baird (eds), 163–185. Oxford: OUP.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baillargeon, R., Scott, R. M. & He, Z.. 2010. False-belief understanding in infants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14(3): 110–118.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bartsch, K. & Wellman, H. M.. 1995. Children Talk about the Mind. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Barwise, J. & Perry, J.. 1981. Situations and attitudes. The Journal of Philosophy 78(11): 668–691.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1983. Situations and Attitudes. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Choi, S.. 1991. Early acquisition of epistemic meanings in Korean: A study of sentence-ending suffixes in the spontaneous speech of three children. First Language 11(3): 93–119.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1995. The development of epistemic sentence-ending modal forms and functions in Korean children. In Modality in Grammar and Discourse [Typological Studies in Language 32], J. Bybee & S. Fleischman (eds), 165–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Villiers, J. G.. In preparation. Perspectives on truth: The case of language and false belief reasoning. In Semantics in Language Acquisition [Trends in Language Acquisition Research], K. Syrett & S. Arunachalam (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
de Villiers, J. G. & de Villiers, P. A.. 2000. Linguistic determinism and the understanding of false beliefs. In Children’s Reasoning and the Mind, P. Mitchell & K. Riggs (eds), 191–228. Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
de Villiers, J. G., Garfield, J., Gernet Girard, H., Roeper, T. & Speas, M.. 2009. Evidentials in Tibetan: Acquisition, semantics and cognitive development. In Evidentiality: A Window into Language and Cognitive Development [Special Issue], S. Fitneva & T. Matsui (eds), New Directions for Adolescent and Child Development 125: 29–48.Google Scholar
Fenici, M.. 2015a. Social cognitive abilities in infancy: Is mindreading the best explanation? Philosophical Psychology 28(3): 387–411.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015b. A simple explanation of apparent early mindreading: infants’ sensitivity to goals and gaze direction. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14(3): 497–515.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garrett, E.. 2001. Evidentiality and Assertion in Tibetan. PhD dissertation, UCLA.
Gopnik, A. & Astington, J. W.. 1988. Children’s understanding of representational change and its relation to the understanding of false belief and the appearance-reality distinction. Child Development 59: 26–37.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kalsang, T., Garfield, J., Speas, M. & de Villiers, J. G.. 2013. Direct evidentials, case, tense and aspect in Tibetan. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 31: 517–561.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kyuchukov, H. & de Villiers, J. G.. 2009. Theory of Mind and evidentiality in Romani-Bulgarian bilingual children. Psychology of Language and Communication 13(2): 21–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Low, J. & Perner, J.. 2012. Implicit and explicit theory of mind: State of the art. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 30: 1–13.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Low, J. & Watts, J.. 2013. Attributing false beliefs about object identity reveals a signature blind spot in humans’ efficient mind-reading system. Psychological Science 24(3): 305–311.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marcus, G. F.. 1993. Negative evidence in language acquisition. Cognition 46(1): 53–85.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milligan, K., Astington, J. W. & Dack, L. A.. 2007. Language and theory of mind: Meta-analysis of the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding. Child development 78(2): 622–646.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Öztürk, Ö. & Papafragou, A.. 2008. Acquisition of evidentiality and source monitoring. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, H. Chan, H. Jacob & E. Kapia (eds), 368–377. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Papafragou, A., Li, P., Choi, Y., & Han, C. H.. 2007. Evidentiality in language and cognition. Cognition 103(2): 253–299.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Perner, J. & Ruffman, T.. 2005. Infants' insight into the mind: How deep. Science 308(5719): 214–216.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pillow, B. H.. 1989. Early understanding of perception as a source of knowledge. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 47(1): 116–129.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pratt, C. & Bryant, P.. 1990. Young children understand that looking leads to knowing (so long as they are looking into a single barrel). Child Development 61(4): 973–982.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schenner, M.. 2010. Evidentials in complex sentences: foundational issues and data from Turkish and German. In Evidence from Evidentials, T. Peterson & U. Sauerland (eds), 28: 183–220. University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics. Google Scholar
Shatz, M., Wellman, H. M. & Silber, S.. 1983. The acquisition of mental verbs: A systematic investigation of the first reference to mental state. Cognition 14(3): 301–321.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Southgate, V., Senju, A. & Csibra, G.. 2007. Action anticipation through attribution of false belief by 2-year-olds. Psychological Science 18(7): 587–592.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Speas, P.. 2010. Evidentials as generalized functional heads. Linguistik aktuell: Amsterdamer Arbeiten zur theoretischen & angewandten Linguistik 156: 127–150. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ünal, E. & Papafragou, A.. 2016. Production-comprehension asymmetries and the acquisition of evidential morphology. Journal of Memory and Language 89: 179–199.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Uzundağ, B., Taşçı, S., Küntay, A. & Aksu-Koç, A.. 2015. Functions of evidentials in Turkish child and child-directed speech in early child-caregiver interactions. Paper presented at the 40th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development .
Wimmer, H. & Perner, J.. 1983. Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition 13(1): 103–128.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

de Villiers, Jill
2021. With Language in Mind. Language Learning and Development 17:2 ► pp. 71 ff. DOI logo
de Villiers, Jill G.
2018. Chapter 10. Perspectives on truth. In Semantics in Language Acquisition [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 24], ► pp. 222 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.