ABSTRACT
The general research question of this project, of which the following chapter is a part, can be described as follows: “How does the ability develop to conceptualize, organize, and express complex temporal structures in discourse?” This involves questions of general cognitive development and of linguistic development, as well as the interrelation of these two domains. In order to tackle these questions, a crosslinguistic perspective was chosen, 394because “only through the study of discourse across various languages, and across the entire developmental periods, can we sort out the role of various types of linguistic devices in the development of temporal cognition and its expression” (Slobin, 1985b, p. 14). To present the problem in these terms calls for an analytical frame which takes a concept (notions such as “simultaneity” or functions such as “background/foreground”) as the starting point for the analyses. On this basis, different language systems can be made comparable.
