ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter acknowledges the contribution of Susan Ervin-Tripp to the study of children's language. She started out by focusing on form, then moved on to function, with her current work reflecting an insightful integration between the two (e.g., in Ervin-Tripp, 1989). The present study considers the relationship between form and function in language acquisition and language development through analysis of the Hebrew morpheme ve, the counterpart of English and, in early conversational interaction and in the narratives of children aged 3 to 9 compared with adults.
