Development of Modality in First Language Acquisition: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

✍ Scribed by Ursula Stephany (editor); Ayhan Aksu-Koç (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 604
• Series: Studies on Language Acquisition [SOLA]; 54
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book deals with the development of modality from a crosslinguistic perspective and is closely related to two earlier volumes on the development of verb and nominal inflection in first language acquisition (SOLA 21 and 30) both methodologically and theoretically. Each of the fourteen contributions studies the early development of the form and function of expressions of deontic and dynamic agent-oriented modality or epistemic and evidential propositional modality in one of fourteen languages belonging to different morphological types and language families (seven Indo-European and seven non-Indo-European).

The analyses are mainly based on longitudinal observations of children in their 2nd and 3rd years of life in conversational interaction with their caregivers, mostly the mothers. Main issues addressed are the development of directives and modulations of information in terms of certainty and evidentiality, also taking into account children’s developing social-pragmatic and cognitive skills. One of the main findings is that agent-oriented and propositional modality may develop in parallel depending on the typological characteristics of the language acquired. The decisive factor is whether notions of propositional modality are grammaticized and obligatorily expressed in the language. The findings are interpreted within non-nativist theoretical frameworks (Usage-based theories, Natural Morphology).

• Crosslinguistic study of the acquisition of modality in typologically and genetically diverse languages
• Emergence of deontic/dynamic and epistemic/evidential expressions until age 3;0
• Discourse and contextual analysis of mother-child conversation

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
List of abbreviations used in the present volume
Studying the acquisition of modality: An introduction
Requests in first language acquisition of German: Evidence from high and low SES families
Gender differences in the acquisition of requests in Lithuanian
Development of directive expressions in Russian adult–child communication
Acquisition of modality in Croatian
Competition of grammatical forms in the expression of directives in early French child speech and child-directed speech
On the acquisition of dynamic, deontic and epistemic uses of modal verbs in Romanian
Development of modality in early Greek language acquisition
Acquisition of requests in Estonian
Directives in Finnish language acquisition
Modality in child Hebrew
Epistemic modality in Russian child language
Epistemic and evidential modality in early Turkish child speech
The development of sentence-ending epistemic/evidential markers in young Korean children
The acquisition of evidentiality in two Mayan languages, Yukatek and Tojolabal
Conclusions
List of Contributors
Subject Index