The Acquisition of kennen in German: The Role of Object Animacy

Sentential complements have been argued to provide an important syntactic cue to mental verb meanings. However, many languages have mental verbs that do not allow sentential complements. In German, kennen 'know’ expresses objectual knowledge and takes only noun phrase complements. This thesis investigates object animacy as a potential cue to the mental-state meaning of kennen. I use Dowty's proto-role theory to argue that the non-prototypical patient properties of kennen objects predict their greater likelihood of being animate. The main finding is that kennen has a significantly higher proportion of animate objects than frequent transitive verbs and patterns more closely with perception verbs. I propose that subject and object animacy together may provide learners with a distributional cue to the mental-state meaning of kennen.