ABSTRACT
A s the rst author of this chapter, I met Dan Slobin for the rst time in 1987 during my stay in Berkeley as a postdoc just after I nished my dissertation work on the language and literacy development of Turkish children in the Netherlands. I became heavily inuenced by his theoretical framework on the language-making capacity of the child. Among the varieties of languages Slobin has taken into account in his work, Turkish has been a topic of special interest and I shared his passion for the study of Turkish language and culture (for a synopsis, see Verhoeven, 1991a). I was also highly impressed by Berman and Slobin’s (1994) work on relating events in narratives which neatly showed how the construct of language achievement by the child can be seen as the result of a complex interaction between morpho-syntax, lexicon, and discourse functions. It resulted in a collaborative attempt at a follow-up volume in which typological and contextual perspectives on narrative development were further explored (Strömqvist & Verhoeven, 2005).
