ABSTRACT
O ver the years, Dan Slobin’s work has touched repeatedly on the classical developmental tri-angle of language acquisition, diachronic change, and language evolution. A striking thing about Dan has always been his willingness, indeed his eagerness, to change his mind, nowhere more conspicuously than in his reections upon the interaction between the three developmental domains. In the 1970s, Dan pioneered the idea of a close parallelism between rst language acquisition and diachronic change (Slobin, 1977). In the 1980s he rejected this idea for lack of demonstrable shared mechanisms (Bybee & Slobin, 1982; Slobin, 1985, 1994, 2002). In the same vein, he has also come to reject the recapitulationist parallelism, attractive to many of us, on general biological grounds (e.g., Lamendella, 1976, 1977; Bickerton, 1981, 1990; Givón, 1979, 2002; see also Gould, 1977), between child language development and language evolution (Slobin, 2002).
