ABSTRACT
Over the past years, there has been a growing number of studies demonstrating that children's acquisition of various aspects of linguistic structure are related to aspects of the interactional and discursive contexts (see Berman & Slobin, 1994; Budwig, 1993, 1995; Ervin-Tripp, 1977, 1989, 1993; Slobin, 1985). Children of a variety of age groups, acquiring different sorts of languages, have been noted to link the use of particular linguistic forms with clusters of semantic, pragmatic, and discursive notions. In this chapter, I attempt to go beyond the claim that children link particular linguistic devices with specific semantic and pragmatic notions, and examine the question of the basis for such linkages. Although there have been many illustrations that grammar and discourse are linked in important ways in children's early linguistic productions, there has been little attention to the study of the sources of such systematizations.
