ABSTRACT
D an Slobin’s breadth of interest and expertise has been one important factor in determining the importance of his contributions to the understanding of language. Particularly impor-tant has been his ability to draw upon both child language and language change as sources of evidence for the nature of language. In the paper quoted above he outlined a number of general principles of language that emerged from an examination of language change and language acquisition. He did not, however, subscribe to the generally accepted view that children are responsible for language change; rather, in characteristic fashion, he was able to see beyond the supercial similarities to identify the core issues: language change and language acquisition are distinct processes and while they interact, the second does not cause the rst. In Bybee and Slobin (1982a), we reported on differences between the errors that children make in using the English past tense (from Bybee and Slobin, 1982b) and typical change in morphological systems, concluding that young children are not the source of these changes. Later, in a 1997 chapter, Slobin presented arguments against the proposal that grammaticizable notions are innate (see discussion below).
