ABSTRACT
D an Slobin’s work has been an inspiration from my 2 rst encounters with psycholinguistics
as an undergraduate. I rst met him some 30 years ago, when I was a research assistant on the Bristol Language Development Project, which was strongly inuenced by Dan’s
crosslinguistic language acquisition project at Berkeley in the 1970s. From then until the present, I have been indebted to him, not just for his remarkable studies, but for the way his work exemplies three fundamental lessons of method. The rst is that if you want to understand the psychology of language, you have to understand language and linguistics. Dan Slobin’s achievement has been to transform the ‘border’ sub-discipline of psycholinguistics into a truly interdisciplinary psychology of language, and in doing so he has contributed enormously to both psychology and linguistics. The second is that to understand language, you have to study languages. The transformation, in the last two decades or so, of the psychology of language into a comparative discipline may not have been
Dan’s work alone, but he has undeniably been its leading proponent. The third is that our science is one with a longer tradition than is often acknowledged by contemporary theorists. There is no researcher with a more encyclopedic knowledge of this tradition than Dan. His awareness of it has informed his healthy skepticism toward claims from various quarters to newly minted monopolies on truth. There are few researchers who embody the combination of depth and breadth of knowledge of both past and contemporary research, and Dan Slobin is one of them. This chapter builds, with gratitude and affection, on his recent work on the typology of motion events.
