In Search of L1 Evidence for Diachronic Reanalysis: Mapping Modal Verbs

The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005 Gleitman, Lila R., Cassidy, Kimberly, Papafragou, Anna, Nappa, Rebecca and Trueswell, John C. 2005. Hard words. Journal of Language Learning and Development, 1(1): 23–64. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping errors are responsible for innovations in the historical record (see Kiparsky 1974 Kiparsky, Paul. 1974. “Remarks on analogical change”. In Proceedings of the First International Congress of Historical Linguistics, Edited by: Jones, Charles and Anderson, John M. 257–276. Amsterdam: North Holland. [Google Scholar]; Roberts & Roussou 2003 Roberts, Ian and Roussou, Anna. 2003. Syntactic change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], among others). This suggests that child error patterns should be consistent with historical changes. I studied the acquisition of modal lexemes by flavor (e.g., ability, epistemic) in order to assess the validity of this proposal in relation to the mapping problem. A preference task and a sentence-repair task were designed to address the question: Do children make structural mapping errors that, if left unchecked, are compatible with the innovations we see in the historical record (e.g., deontic > epistemic)? This study provides experimental data on the acquisition of modal lexemes by flavor and some long-awaited preliminary support for the hypothesis that child learners drive historical change.