ABSTRACT
I had the wonderful opportunity in the early 1990s to do a postdoctoral fellowship with Dan Slobin and Sue Ervin-Tripp, working on child language issues at the University of California, Berkeley’s Psychology Department. I took courses from Dan and sat in on meetings of his research group, which was meeting at the time on the crosslinguistic study of language in narrative. I came to be inuenced by Dan’s dynamic approach of looking at how child speakers select forms to express particular discursive functions and semantic notions, and how language-specic, cognitive, communicative, and developmental factors enter into these choices. His view of children as active constructors of their own language, and his approach of looking at how language forms are selected by speakers in very specic contexts, is reected in the work I did at Berkeley on children’s causal constructions in narratives and arguments. This inuence can also be seen in the analysis presented below, which examines the transitivity of very young children’s verb constructions as used in their peer disputes. I feel very lucky to be among the many child language researchers today for whom Dan has been a teacher.
