ABSTRACT
T his Festschrift contribution discusses paradigms. Infants and toddlers must discover the grammatical distinctions that will be important for building paradigms in their language and they must learn to incorporate the choices afforded by the paradigms into the sentences they produce. This was the perspective that pervaded the thinking of many minds devoting their time and attention to the problem of language development in the late 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley. At the center of this group, both challenging and guiding us, was Dan Slobin. This chapter is also about principles and prediction. As we shall see, Dan Slobin’s forays into understanding the development of paradigms led to some initial principles. This chapter seeks to move us beyond principles to a level of prediction about the behavior of individual children.
