A Cognitive Study on the Acquisition of Intensional Verbs in English

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This study attempted to reveal the nature of the innate constraint that governs the cross-linguistic variation in the availability of the intensional transitive verb need. The results obtained from the analysis of the spontaneous speech corpora of 10 English-learning children showed that there was no child who acquired the transitive need significantly earlier than the transitive have. These results not only lend support to the claim by Harves & Kayne (2008) that only those languages that have the transitive have permits the transitive need, but more importantly provide support for the innate constraints on language variation.This study also investigated the nature of the innate constraint that are relevant to the cross-linguistic variation in argument ellipsis, and also the innate constraint that determine the cross-linguistic variation in fragment answers.