Acquisition of epistemic marking in Estonian and Russian

Abstract

The article compares the acquisition of epistemic modality in typologically different languages, Estonian and Russian. The longitudinal data of 4 children was used to analyse the first emergence and the further development of lexical markers expressing certainty and uncertainty. Developmental analysis of micro fields of epistemic modality has shown that in both languages the semantics of uncertainty starts to be acquired slightly earlier than certainty. The main tendencies in the usage of epistemic markers in utterances are similar in our corpora. Since the acquisition of epistemic modality is similar in the two languages, it would be reasonable to assume that some categories, like epistemic modality, rely more on general cognitive development than others.

Keywords

• first language acquisition
• epistemic modality
• certainty
• uncertainty
• Estonian
• Russian