EVIDENTIALITY AND EPISTEMIC MODALITY COMBINE IN THE ESTONIAN MORPHEME -VAT BUT ARE DIFFERENT CATEGORIES IN ACQUISITION: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

Since Aikhenvald 2004, evidentiality has been severed from epistemic modality. We studied the evidential and epistemic modal aspects of the Estonian evidential -vat experimentally and on the basis of a corpus study. We designed two experiments to separate the two categories. Four-, six-, and nine-year-old children were first asked to identify the source of the information provided with the morpheme. Then they performed a forced choice task guided by grammar: affirmative indicative, negative, and evidential sentences. Four-year-olds did not understand the evidential and modal -vat. Six year-olds showed an increased understanding of the evidential meaning but not the modal meaning or use. Nine-year-olds demonstrated full understanding of the evidential and an increased understanding of the epistemic modal aspect of the evidential. Estonian children thus develop the correct understanding of the morpheme -vat as an epistemic modal only after learning its evidential meaning. Adapted from the source document