Jonkers, Sara
[UCL]
Modal verbs appear early and frequently in child Dutch, especially the verbs kunnen (‘can’) and moeten (‘must’). In adult Dutch, modal verbs have several non-epistemic meanings. The question is whether modal verbs in child Dutch are already polysemous as well. Furthermore, it has been claimed that participant-internal modal source (‘dynamic’) is found to occur before participant-external modal source (‘deontic’) (see e.g., Shatz & Wilcox 1991; Choi 2006). However, this claim is not supported by much data. Hence, the question arises whether modal source is indeed different in the acquisition of Dutch modals. In order to answer this, we conducted a truth-value judgment task: 87 Dutch speaking children (age: 3;0-6;0) assessed frequent, infrequent and incorrect interpretations of the two frequent modal verbs (39 items in total). The results show that children interpret moeten and kunnen non adult-like, with increasing performance by age (correlation: ρ=.62, p<.005). In spite of their early appearance, non-epistemic meanings of modal verbs clearly develop further during this age range. Children not only accept modal interpretations that are not accepted by adults, but also non-modal interpretations (e.g. ongoing). Unexpectedly, modal source cannot explain the interpretational differences. In contrast, modal force can: modal possibility seems to be interpreted less adult-like than modal necessity (see table). This might be linked to developing cognitive capacities, since modal possibility requires understanding of the notion of optionality. The deviant performance of children seems to be due to a less restrictive interpretation of modal verbs, especially of moeten, which might lead to an ‘overuse’ of this verb in early child language, which can be connected to its high frequency in spontaneous child speech. These results indicate that children might treat moeten as a dummy-like verb. The main function of moeten would then be to connect a topic and a predicate (following e.g. Jordens 2007).
Bibliographic reference |
Jonkers, Sara. Modal verbs and their meanings in Dutch first language acquisition.Child Language Seminar (Manchester, du 19/06/2013 au 21/06/2013). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/180567 |