Evidentials in Tibetan: Acquisition, semantics, and cognitive development

Abstract

We describe the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and consider the challenges that any evidential system presents to language acquisition. We present data from Tibetan-speaking children that shed light on their understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials, and their competence in the point-of-view shift required for the use of evidentials in questions. We then examine connections between the mastery of indirect evidentials and children's inferential competence.