Picture a small child saying: "Can’t, shan’t, won’t!" They are using modal verbs to show their feelings and attitude to something. Maybe they are refusing to go to bed or eat their peas. Modal verbs ...

Modal verbs are words that change the meaning of other verbs. We use them to express if something is certain, likely, possible or impossible. Words like ‘could’, ‘would’, ‘may’, ‘can’, ‘must’, and ...

The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping ...