ABSTRACT
T here is a story in how Dan Slobin inuenced my research. Joan Bybee, my Ph.D. supervisor, was on leave at Berkeley; on one occasion when I was visiting her I was invited to participate in a workshop on crosslinguistic language acquisition research organized by Dan Slobin. At the time I was teaching at the University of Oregon but a job in Australia was possible. When he heard about this possibility Dan suggested it would be a great opportunity to work on the acquisition of an Australian indigenous language. This was the initiating event. It seemed highly unlikely at the time, but as the plot unfolded, which will not be detailed here, I eventually arrived as a naive eld worker in Yuendumu in central Australia. Many eld trips later I started to collect frog stories. Later I was fortunate to be able to visit Dan at Berkeley for one semester, and also to participate in a workshop run by Dan focusing on analyzing frog stories from a typological perspective. My research on Warlpiri was heavily inuenced by Dan’s work. He has remained a source of inspiration.
