Evidentials in Tibetan: acquisition, semantics, and cognitive development.
We describe the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and consider the challenges that any evidential system presents to language acquisition. We present data from Tibetan-speaking children that shed light on their understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials, and their competence in the point-of-view shift required for the use of evidentials in questions. We then examine connections between the mastery of indirect evidentials and children's inferential competence.
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA. jdevil@smith.edu
Jill G
JG
de Villiers
Jay
J
Garfield
Harper
H
Gernet-Girard
Tom
T
Roeper
Margaret
M
Speas
D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D018609:Tibet