ABSTRACT
A s a young graduate student at Berkeley, in the summer of 1972, I was invited to join a won-derful group of people in Dubrovnik where they were preparing to launch the rst compre-hensive crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. This rst encounter with Dan Slobin was the beginning of my inquiry into language and my rst insights and enthusiasm went into the exploration of evidentials. The same excitement prevailed during the years when I looked on and off into the question of what the cognitive underpinnings for their acquisition might be. Given the ‘meta’ nature of this semantic/pragmatic domain, the results of this search have not crystallized easily. In this chapter I tried to systematize what I have learned, using again some of Dan’s guiding principles as the key, and our shared curiosity for what the linguistic mind can achieve as the motivating force. But of course, what I have learned from him-about language, about development, and about how to look at both-has just remained in the background, together with all I learned about how to give and how to guide, that is, about friendship and mentorship.
