ABSTRACT
The focus and success of research into child language acquisition is both conditioned and constrained by the linguistic framework within which the researcher works. As the major focus of linguistics moved from writing surface grammars to investigating the native speaker-hearer’s grammatical competence to analysing semantic deep structure and now to a concern with pragmatics, speech acts, contextualized utterances and the structure of conversation, so there were parallel changes in the focus of child language research.
