ABSTRACT
W hen “Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar” (Slobin, 1973) was pub-lished, I was a new graduate student at Berkeley, fascinated by Dan’s vision of the acqui-sition process as building on a universal set of cognitively based Operating Principles. Years later, when Dan launched his vast crosslinguistic project, I was thrilled to participate in the quest to understand the child’s “Language-Making Capacity” (LMC), and the Operating Principles that comprise it. My nal years at Berkeley were spent analyzing my Japanese acquisition data for contributions I could make to this quest. My graduate years thus began and ended with the challenge that Dan had set: to specify the nature of the human capacity for constructing grammar.
