Early acquisition of epistemic meanings in Korean: a study of sentence-ending suffixes in the spontaneous speech of three children

Abstract

This study investigates the form and function of sentence-ending suffixes in the speech of three Korean children between 1;8 and 2;11. The major findings are that before 2;0 years Korean children make a clear morphological distinction between requests and statements, and that when they make statements they distinguish among three types of propositions, each with a distinct form: (1) the information has been recently acquired by the child through direct experience, and it is in the process of being assimilated to the child's knowledge system (-TA); (2) the information has been assimilated to his/her knowledge system (-E); (3) the information is established and, in addition, it is certain and is shared by the interactant (-CI). These denote different types of epistemic meaning in that they mark various degrees of integration of knowledge in the child's mind. Our data also suggest that Korean children make these epistemic distinctions before deontic ones, e.g., desire, intention.