Modal verbs and their meanings in Dutch first language acquisition
(2012) 5. Nordwestdeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium — Location: Oldenburg (14.December.2012)
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- Abstract
- Based on the fact that modal verbs have several non-epistemic modal meanings in adult Dutch (e.g., van der Auwera & Plungian 1998, Nuyts 2005), combined with the observation that modal verbs occur relatively early and frequent in child Dutch (e.g., van Kampen & Wijnen 2000, Gillis 2003, Blom 2008), the question arises whether children already use modal verbs with all the different adult meanings as soon as they start using them. In order to answer this question, we conducted an experiment for two frequent modal verbs: moeten (‘must’) and kunnen (‘can’). 106 children from the age of three until six performed two comprehension tasks and a production task. The experiment shows that the adult meanings of the modal verbs are already acquired early, with an acquisitional difference in modal force (i.e., modal necessity seems to be acquired earlier than modal possibility). This is unlike what has been described before, as modal source (i.e., participant external versus participant internal) is suggested to cause differences in the acquisition (see e.g., Shatz & Wilcox 1991, Stephany 1993, Wells 1985, Choi 2006). Moreover, the comprehension tasks showed that children seem to be less restrictive in their interpretation of moeten (‘must’), as both adult and non-adult meanings are possible (not only other modal meanings, but also non-modal meanings were accepted for moeten). This might indicate an ‘overuse’ of moeten (‘must’) in early child language, which can be connected to its unexpected high frequency in early child language (see e.g., presentation of the corpus data, NWLK 2010). Furthermore, this underspecified meaning of moeten (‘must’) could be interpreted in the direction of a dummy-like use. The main importance of moeten (‘must’) in early child language would then be to connect a topic and a predicate (following e.g., Jordens 2007).
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Jonkers, S. (2012). Modal verbs and their meanings in Dutch first language acquisition. 5. Nordwestdeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium, Oldenburg. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/182181