Dutch modal verbs, kunnen ('can'), moeten ('must'), mogen ('may'),

willen ('will'/'want'), zullen ('shall'/'will'), and hoeven ('need') are

complex, semantically, morphologically, and syntactically. Therefore,

one could expect that modals occur only rarely in early child language.

Surprisingly however, children as young as 2 years old use modal verbs

rather frequently in their spontaneous speech. But do these early modal

verbs already have the same semantic, morphological, and syntactic

characteristics as in adult speech? I answer this questions through

the investigation of corpus data, focusing on form and structure, and

through the analysis of experimental data, focusing on the meanings

of Dutch modals. Looking into the acquisition of modal verbs not only

gives insight in how children build complex utterances, but also in how

cognitive notions as necessity and possibility develop linguistically.