Ozge Ozturk

The thickness of pitch: Crossmodal metaphors in Farsi, Turkish and Zapotec

ABSTRACT Speakers use vocabulary for spatial verticality and size to describe pitch. A high—low contrast is common to many languages, but others show contrasts like thick—thin and big—small. We consider uses of thick for low pitch and thin for high pitch in three languages: Farsi, Turkish, and Zapotec. We ask how metaphors for pitch structure the sound space. In a language like English, high applies to both high-pitched as well as high-amplitude (loud) sounds; low applies to low-pitched as well as low-amplitude (quiet) sounds. Farsi, Turkish, and Zapotec organize sound in a different way. Thin applies to high pitch and low amplitude and thick to low pitch and high amplitude. We claim that these metaphors have their sources in life experiences. Musical instruments show co-occurrences of higher pitch with thinner, smaller objects and lower pitch with thicker, larger objects. On the other hand bodily experience can ground the high—low metaphor. A raised larynx produces higher pitch and lowered larynx lower pitch. Low-pitched sounds resonate the chest, a lower place than high-pitched sounds. While both patterns are available from life experience, linguistic experience privileges one over the other, which results in differential structuring of the multiple dimensions of sound.

The Acquisition of Evidentiality and Source Monitoring

ABSTRACT Evidentiality in language marks how information contained in a sentence was acquired. For instance, Turkish has two past-tense morphemes that mark whether access to information was direct (typically, perception) or indirect (hearsay/inference). Full acquisition of evidential systems appears to be a late achievement cross-linguistically. Currently, there are two distinct hypotheses about why this is so. According to the first hypothesis, the acquisition of evidentiality is delayed by conceptual factors related to source monitoring (the process of identifying and evaluating information sources). According to a different hypothesis, a substantial part of the learning difficulty comes from mapping evidential markers onto the underlying source concepts (even if these concepts are already available to the child), most likely because source concepts do not correspond to observable referents in the world. Here we tested these two hypotheses in a series of experiments comparing the acquisition of evidential morphology (Experiments 1–3) and the development of source monitoring (Experiments 4–6) in the same group of Turkish-speaking children. We found that the semantics and pragmatics of evidential morphology in Turkish are not acquired until age 6 or 7. A comparison between linguistic evidentiality and source monitoring experiments revealed that conceptual understanding of information access develops before the corresponding concepts are linked to evidential morphemes in Turkish, thereby demonstrating that mapping difficulties underlie the late acquisition of evidentiality in Turkish. Nevertheless, our data also suggest that conceptual limitations play an important role in the acquisition of evidentiality, since in both language and source monitoring direct evidence seems to be privileged compared to indirect evidence. This work has implications for the acquisition of mental-state language and the relation between children’s linguistic and conceptual development.

The Acquisition of Epistemic Modality: From Semantic Meaning to Pragmatic Interpretation

Three experiments investigated the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g., may, have to). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of weak epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (e.g., “The toy may be under the sofa” implies that it is not certain that the toy is under the sofa). Experiment 1 showed that children between the ages of 4 and 5 have mastered key aspects of epistemic modal semantics but have difficulties with contexts involving epistemic possibility. Experiment 2 showed that 4–5-year-olds prefer stronger/more informative over weaker modal statements in contrastive contexts if the stronger statements are warranted by the evidence. Experiment 3 further demonstrated that children of this age can draw pragmatic inferences from the use of weak epistemic modal verbs in contexts that do not involve overt pragmatic judgments. Taken together, these findings throw light on the acquisition of epistemic modality and have implications for the development of the semantics-pragmatics interface.