Emily Sadlier Brown will present the LOC Colloquium, at the West Mall Swing Space – Room 221.
What does apparently mean? And how would you learn it?
Evidentials, like the English word apparently, are morphemes that indicate a speaker’s source of evidence for what they are saying, or “how one learnt something” (Aikhenvald 2004:1). Although all languages have a means of expressing how a speaker knows what they know (Aikhenvald 2004), almost nothing is known about how abstract meanings such as these come to be learned. In this research, I ask two questions: What, exactly, does apparently mean? And how would we learn it? I examine an audio and video corpus of speech used around children to determine what evidence apparently is used with and argue for a semantic representation that is more general than previously claimed. I then examine what cues are available for this meaning in children’s input, in other words, is there evidence for the evidence? I will show that, by looking closely, we can identify a host of linguistic and sociopragmatic cues to meaning in the input, which helps solve the mystery of how a word like apparently could be learned.
References
Aikhenvald, A. I. (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford University Press.
