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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. 167–178

Chapter 11
Nonfactual meanings in early use of evidentials in Turkish child-caregiver interactions

| Koç University, Turkey
| Koç University, Turkey
| Koç University, Turkey

Previous and current observational and experimental studies conducted on Turkish evidentials mainly focus on reportative and inferential uses of the −mIş particle. Here we focused on its nonfactual usage in child-caregiver interaction where we examined a relatively large videotaped corpus of child-caregiver interactions of six children between 8 and 36 months of age. Almost half of the utterances in child’s speech (46.2%) and child-directed speech (50.2%) contained nonfactual information. Besides the previously documented nonfactual functions such as conveying folktales, myths, dreams, and jokes, we noticed that nonfactual utterances can be used to modulate the addressee’s behavior. Furthermore, we observed that children acquired nonfactual usage relatively early. Here, we discuss the emergence and the functions of the nonfactual usage.

Keywords: evidentiality, longitudinal corpus study, child-caregiver interaction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus
  • 3.Coding
    • 3.1Source of information
    • 3.2Pragmatic function
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Nonfactual uses
      • 4.1.1Frequency
      • 4.1.2Purpose of nonfactual uses
      • 4.1.3Age of emergence
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.11uzu
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