Introduction

I t is tting that a book dedicated to “research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin” include a section on narratives. Constructing a narrative provides people with a compelling means for deploying their linguistic, cognitive, and pragmatic knowledge-three strands of inquiry that Slobin has consistently argued should not be treated as autonomous. And children’s narrative development constitutes “a particularly privileged vantage point” for studying the complex relations between language and cognition (Venezeniano, Albert, & Martin, this volume). No coincidence, then, that Slobin’s idea of thinking for speaking emerged out of his contemplation of narratives across languages and across the life-span, as did his view of language use as determined not only by the typological properties of a given language or group of languages but also by the rhetorical preferences of members of a given speech community and the expressive options selected by individual speaker-writers. As the chapters in this section indicate, narratives also afford a richly textured framework for the text-embedded study of developing form/function relations, a notion that Slobin early in his career transformed from its broadly developmental formulation by Werner and Kaplan (1963) into a focus on the relationship between linguistic forms and their discourse functions.