This paper was originally written while the author was at the University of California at Berkeley

It is widely assumed in the developmental literature that certain classes of modal expression appear later in language acquisition than others; specifically, epistemic interpretations lag behind non-epistemic (or root) interpretations. An explanation for these findings is proposed in terms of the child's developing theory of mind, i.e. the ability to attribute to oneself and others mental representations, and to reason inferentially about them. It is hypothesized that epistemic modality crucially implicates theory-of-mind abilities and is therefore expected to depend on prior developments in the child's ability to handle representations of mental representations. In support of this hypothesis, it is shown that autistic individuals (who arguably possess a deficient theory-of-mind mechanism) have difficulty with epistemics.

CONTENTS Introduction. The expression of modality in Korean i I. Scope of investigation i II. Structure of thesis i III. General expository practice ii III.I. Abbreviations ii III.II. Data transcription iii III.III. Data glossing iv III.IV. Data sources and source abbreviations v Chapter 1 Preliminaries 1 1.1. Modality 1 1.1.1. The concept of modality 1 1.1.2. A notional model of modality 5 1.1.3. A taxonomy of modalities 13 1.1.3.1. The basic dichotomy - epistemic and deontic modality 14 1.1.3.2. Epistemic modality 15 1.1.3.3. Deontic modality 17 1.1.3.4. Evidentials 19 1.1.3.5. Dynamic modality 20 1.1.3.6. Volitive modality 22 1.1.3.7. Other types of modality 23 1.2. Korean 24 1.2.1. General language data 24 1.2.2. Classification 25 1.2.3. Phonology 27 1.2.4. Morphology 29 1.2.5. Syntax 31 Chapter 2 Mood 34 2.1. The concept of mood 34 2.2. The verbal system of speech levels 39 2.3. A taxonomy of mood in Korean 42 2.3.1. Neutral mood 2

This study investigated children under- standing (3-, 9-, and of the differ- ent levels of meaning of the cognitive verb know as defined by the Hall, Scholnick, and Hughes (1987) abstractness andconceptual hierarchy. We found that cognitive verb knowledge increased with development and that certain low levels of meaning were mastered before certain high levels of meaning irrespective of the medium of presentation: video- taped skits and audiotaped stories. However, children developed an understanding of low levels of meaning at a more rapid rate than high levels of meaning. resulted in a more differentiated and hierarchical cognitive verb knowledge in older children. Finally, we found that the audiotaped stories were more than the videotaped skits, and that both tasks were significantly correlated with a standardized vocabulary measure for all ages except the implications of this study and others for a model of the cognitive verb lexicon are discussed. The development of...

itiveverb knowledge in older children. Finally, we found that the audio-taped stories were more difficult than the video-taped skits, and that both tasks were significantly correlated with a standardized vocabulary measure for all ages except the 3-year-olds. The implications of this study and others for a model of the cognitive-verb lexicon are discussed. Most research on lexical development has concentrated on the child's acquisition of words that refer to objects, actions, and events (Clark, 1983). Comparatively little research has been conducted on the child's acquisition of words that refer to states, such as cognitive verbs. Moreover, most research that has been conducted has investigated children's first understanding of these cognitive verbs. Only recently has research been conducted on older children's and adults' understanding of these words (cf. Astington & Olson, 1990; Booth & Hall, 1994a, 1994c; Fabricius, SchwanenThis research was

In this paper, I illustrate how children's mentalizing abilities interface with both implicit and explicit aspects of communication. I use two examples to make this point First, I argue that some understanding that other people have mental states which can be affected by communication is present already in infancy. I show that this early sensitivity to intentionality is responsible for early communicative successes. Second, I suggest that mindreading is involved in learning the meaning of evidentials and other mental terms. I present some cross-linguistic evidence for the acquisition of evidential morphemes and relate those findings to young children's ability to reason about beliefs, evidence and information.

this paper included) . Why these experiments? Well, if in fact, these tasks do provide a measure of our ability to attribute mistaken beliefs to others, then they are really a key indicator of a developing `theory of mind' (usually called commonsense or folk psychology in the philosophical literature). Specifically, they indicate emergent understanding that what goes on in our minds often takes precedence over how things are in the world, in determining our behaviour. So anyone investigating the developmental sequence by which we come to understand ourselves and others as intentional agents, can find in the research around this subject a gold-mine of relevant data

this paper. They are not responsible for my views, however