Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T15:28:14.184Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Functions of Turkish evidentials in early child–caregiver interactions: a growth curve analysis of longitudinal data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2018

Berna A. UZUNDAĞ*
Affiliation:
Koç University
Süleyman S. TAŞÇI
Affiliation:
Koç University
Aylin C. KÜNTAY
Affiliation:
Koç University
Ayhan AKSU-KOÇ
Affiliation:
Boğaziçi University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

In languages with evidential marking, utterances consist of an informational content and a specification of the mode of access to that information. In this first longitudinal study investigating the acquisition of the Turkish evidential marker −mIş in naturalistic child–caregiver interactions, we examined six children between 8 and 36 months of age. We charted individual differences in child and caregiver speech over time by conducting growth curve analyses. Children followed a similar course of acquisition in terms of the proportion of the marker in overall speech. However, children exhibited differences with respect to the order of emergence of different evidential functions (e.g., inference, hearsay), where each child showed a unique pattern irrespective of the frequency in caregiver input. Nonfactual use of the marker was very frequent in child and caregiver speech, where high-SES caregivers mostly produced the marker during story-telling and pretend play, and low-SES caregivers for regulating the child's behavior.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The online version of this article has been updated since original publication. A notice detailing the changes has also been published at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000922000162.

References

Aikhenvald, Y. A. (2004). Evidentiality. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Aksu-Koç, A. (1988/2006). The acquisition of aspect and modality: the case of past reference in Turkish. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Aksu-Koç, A. (2016). The interface of evidentials and epistemics in Turkish: perspectives from acquisition. In Güven, M., Akar, D., Öztürk, B., & Kelepir, M. (Eds.), Exploring the Turkish linguistic landscape: essays in honor of Eser Erguvanlı-Taylan (Studies in Language Companion Series 175) (pp. 143–56). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Aksu-Koç, A., & Slobin, D. (1986). A psychological account of the development and use of evidentials in Turkish. In Chafe, W. & Nichols, J. (Eds.), Evidentiality: the linguistic coding of epistemology (pp. 159–67). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2014). lme4: linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1-7. Retrieved from <http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4>..>Google Scholar
Bybee, J. (1985). Morphology: a study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.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, 93119.Google Scholar
Clancy, P. (1985). The acquisition of Japanese. In Slobin, D. I. (Ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. 1 (pp. 373524). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Courtney, E. (2008). Child production of Quechua evidential morphemes in conversations and story retellings. Unpublished ms, University of Texas at El Paso. Retrieved from <http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=ellenhcourtney>..>Google Scholar
de Haan, F. (2001). The place of inference within the evidential system. International Journal of American Linguistics, 67, 193219.Google Scholar
DeLancey, S. (2001). The mirative and evidentiality. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 369–82.Google Scholar
Göksel, A., & Kerslake, C. (2005). Turkish: a comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hocking, T. D. (2014). directlabels: direct labels for multicolor plots in lattice or ggplot2. R package version 2014.1.31/r678. Retrieved from <http://R-Forge.R-project.org/projects/directlabels/>..>Google Scholar
Johanson, L. (2003). Evidentiality in Turkic. In Aikhenvald, A. & Dixon, R. M. W. (Eds.), Studies in evidentiality (pp. 273–90). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Johnson, M. K., Hashtroudi, S., & Lindsay, D. S. (1993). Source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 328.Google Scholar
Küntay, A. C., Koçbaş, D., & Taşçı, S. S. (2015). Koç University Longitudinal Language Development Database as a part of the ‘ACQDIV Corpus’. retrieved from <http://www.acqdiv.uzh.ch/en/resources.html>..>Google Scholar
Lee, H. T., & Law, A. (2000). Evidential final particles in child Cantonese. In Clark, E. V. (Ed.), The proceedings of the 30th annual Child Language Conference (pp. 131–8). Stanford, CA: Center for the study of Language and Information.Google Scholar
Matsui, T. (2014). Children's understanding of linguistic expressions of certainty and evidentiality. In Matthews, D. (Ed.), Pragmatic development in first language acquisition (pp. 295316). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Matsui, T., & Yamamoto, T. (2013). Developing sensitivity to the sources of information: early use of the Japanese quotative particles tte and to in mother–child conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 59, 525.Google Scholar
Ögel, H. (2007). Developments in source monitoring and linguistic encoding of source. Unpublished master's thesis, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey.Google Scholar
Ozturk, O., & Papafragou, A. (2016). The acquisition of evidentiality and source monitoring. Language Learning and Development, 12, 199230.Google Scholar
Pinheiro, J., Bates, D., DebRoy, S., Sarkar, D., & R Core Team (2017). nlme: linear and nonlinear mixed effects models. R package version 3.1-118. Retrieved from <http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=nlme>..>Google Scholar
Plungian, V. A. (2001). The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical space. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(3), 349–57.Google Scholar
Sarkar, D. (2008). Lattice: multivariate data visualization with R. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Scheipl, F., Greven, S., & Kuechenhoff, H. (2008). Size and power of tests for a zero random effect variance or polynomial regression in additive and linear mixed models. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 52(7), 3283–99.Google Scholar
Shirai, J., Shirai, H., & Furuta, Y. (2000). Acquisition of sentence-final particles in Japanese. In Perkins, M. & Howard, S. (Eds.), New directions in language development and disorders (pp. 243–50). London: Plenum.Google Scholar
Singer, J. D., & Willett, J. B. (2003). Applied longitudinal data analysis: modeling change and event occurrence. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Slobin, D., & Aksu, A. (1982). Tense, aspect, modality, and more in Turkish evidentials. In Hopper, P. (Ed.), Tense–aspect: between semantics and pragmatics (pp. 185200). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Ünal, E., & Papafragou, A. (2016). Production–comprehension asymmetries and the acquisition of evidential morphology. Journal of Memory and Language, 89, 179–99.Google Scholar
Wickham, H. (2009). ggplot2: elegant graphics for data analysis. New York: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Willett, T. L. (1988). A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticization of evidentiality. Studies in Language, 12, 5197.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Uzundag et al. supplementary material

Uzundag et al. supplementary material 1

Download Uzundag et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 188.5 KB