A Cognitive Study on the Acquisition of Intensional Verbs in English

本研究试图揭示内在约束的本质，这种约束支配着跨语言的及物动词需要的可得性差异。对10名英语学习儿童自发语料库的分析结果表明，没有儿童获得及物需求明显早于获得及物需求。这些结果不仅支持了Harves & Kayne（2008）的主张，即只有那些具有及物性的语言才有允许及物需求，更重要的是为语言变异的先天约束提供了支持。本研究还探讨了与论点省略跨语言变化相关的先天约束的性质，以及决定片段回答跨语言变化的先天约束。

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.