The Acquisition of Epistemic Modality
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0044/000044Abstract
In this paper we try to contribute to the body of knowledge about the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g. Mary may/has to be at school). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Prag-matically, the use of epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational infer-ences (Mary may be at school -> Mary doesn’t have to be at school). The acquisition of epistemic modals is challenging for children on both these levels. In this paper, we present findings from two studies which were conducted with 5-year-old children and adults. Our findings, unlike previous work, show that 5-yr-olds have mastered epistemic modal semantics, including the notions of necessity and possibility. How-ever, they are still in the process of acquiring epistemic modal pragmatics.
References
Hintikka, J. 1969. Models for Modalities, Reidel, Dordrecht.
Noveck, I. A. 2001. When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition, 78(2), 165-188.
Papafragou, A., & Ozturk, O.I. 2006. On the acquisition of modality. To appear in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. Dept. of Linguistics, UPenn.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Anna Papafragou (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
