ABSTRACT
In this paper I examine the transition in young children from highly repetitious conversational discourse to formally and semantically mor~ diverse discourse. In previous papers (see Chapter 1 and Chapter 2) I have suggested that the decline of X-utterance repetition was linked in part to the child's developing use of old information markers, such as anaphoric pronouns, definite articles and so on. For example, whereas at an earlier stage a child might respond to the utterance 'Tractor's comin" by repeating 'Tractor's comin", at a later stage the child might respond 'It's comin". Both responses are performing the same pragmatic work; for example, they both acknowledge the previous speaker's utterance, but the latter looks considerably more like adult discourse. Here I wish to focus on related dimensions of this critical transition. I would like to claim that the transition is marked by two developments: first, a development in the formal relation obtaining across utterances; second, a development in the semantic links obtaining between lexical items across utterances.
