Evidentsiaalsuse ja episteemilise modaalsuse suhetest eesti lastekeeles käitumiskatsete põhjal

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