Early Acquisition of Semantic Type Meanings of Modal Verbs in Mandarin-Speaking Children

Modal verbs serve as the primary grammatical means for expressing modality in Mandarin Chinese.From the perspective of semantic types, modality is commonly classified into three categories: dynamic modality, which conveys volition or ability; deontic modality, which relates to obligation or permission; and epistemic modality, which reflects judgments of possibility or necessity.Investigating how young children acquire these semantic type meanings offers important insights into their linguistic and socio-cognitive development.This study, based on the "Mandarin Children's Multimodal Spoken Corpus", provides a comprehensive analysis of how three Mandarin-speaking children aged 1 to 4 acquire the semantics of modal verbs through naturalistic interaction.Modal acquisition is examined across three semantic types, with a detailed case analysis of the polysemous modal verb yo to explore the developmental trajectory of both root and epistemic meanings.Findings reveal that children's acquisition of modal semantics in early language development is systematic and robust.Between the ages of 1;6 and 3;3, the three children gradually acquired nearly all modal verbs under investigation and developed modal meanings across all semantic types.Their acquisition followed a clear developmental pattern: dynamic modality emerged first and appeared most frequently, followed by deontic modality, and finally epistemic modality.In acquiring yo, the children first produced the dynamic meaning of volition, then the deontic meaning of obligation, and lastly the epistemic meaning of necessity.This acquisition sequence closely parallels the diachronic semantic evolution of modal verbs in Mandarin.Moreover, the semantic acquisition of yo was found to be shaped not only by semantic categories, but also by temporal reference and syntactic context.By investigating the development of children's modal semantics, this study highlights the cognitive process of subjectification in language acquisition and offers empirical evidence for the coordinated development of language and cognition in early childhood.