8 - Production and comprehension of the quotative function

Summary

The quotative or hearsay use, it was hypothesized, would be the last grammatical function of the -mlş particle to be discovered by children. In this purely modal function -mlş, indicates that the propositional content of the speaker's utterance is not derived from direct experience but from the ‘spoken word’. In other words, the quotative use of the -mlş, particle involves referring to aspects of discourse itself.

My prediction that the quotative function of -mlş, would be more complex was grounded on both cognitive and semantic considerations. Cognitively, this use would depend on children's ability to talk about events not personally experienced, i.e. on their ability to reconstruct from memory information obtained solely through the medium of language. Since no phase of the event is directly experienced, there will be no cues available from the nonlinguistic context at the time of encoding. Mental representation of such information can be assumed to be more complex just on the basis of processing factors. Furthermore it has been variously noted that young children show reluctance in talking about events not related to the present context, and in particular, about experiences not shared with their interlocutor (Sachs, 1979; de Lemos and Bybee, 1981). These findings suggest that it would be even more difficult for children to report experiences that they have not experienced themselves.

Semantically, I argue that the purely modal use of -mlş rests on a more complex presuppositional structure which is represented at the performative level.