ABSTRACT
M y main difculty in following the editors’ guidelines was how to write a “short” paragraph about Dan’s impact on my life and work.1 Here goes my feeble attempt to apply one of the countless lessons I learned from Dan: When thinking for speaking (or writing), be “clear, processible, quick and easy, and expressive” (Slobin, 1977, p. 186). Since Dan urged me to look into acquisition of Hebrew when we rst met at a coffee-shop in Berkeley in the 1970s, we have shared many good meals and much talk in Berkeley, Nijmegen, and Beth-Herut, along with workshops in crosslinguistic acquisition (1980), temporality (1981, 1986), and narrative development (1995). Both within and beyond these contexts, although I am the older, Dan was and is the wiser. I am indebted to him for having inspired my thinking and guided my research on form-function relations in language acquisition, development, and use. In the language shared by our parents’ generation, my broxe ‘blessing’ to him in this well-deserved tribute from our community is zol er zayn gezunt un shtark nokh lange yorn!2
