Exploring syntactically encoded evidentiality

Abstract

ABSTRACT The most recent studies on the acquisition of evidentiality, be it morphologically or syntactically encoded, have argued that the comprehension lag detected is due to factors having to do with 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). However, these studies have yet to detect the age at which children eventually align with adults in comprehending the grammatical structure encoding the evidential interpretation when it is syntactically encoded. The comprehension study reported in this article has taken the aforementioned factors into consideration and has involved a large number of Greek-speaking children between second and fifth grades, along with an adult control group, to investigate syntactically encoded evidentiality. The results suggest that children align with adults in mapping source of evidence to sentence type during fourth grade, when they are 9 years old or older, suggesting that there should be additional factors behind the delayed comprehension of evidentiality. It is argued that these factors are mainly grammatical, and, most importantly, they arise to a larger extent in languages that encode evidentiality in the syntax