Presented by the ARC Centre for Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

The talk concerns the development of the relations between linguistic forms and discursive functions in the usage of children from pre-school across adolescence.  A range of linguistic systems (prepositions, verb semantics, inter-clausal connectives, tense-aspect marking] are considered in different types of discourse settings (picturebook-based narratives, fable reconstructions, personal-experience accounts) and in different languages (English, French, Spanish, Hebrew) to argue for Slobin’s (1973, 2003) proposal that, with age, new and more varied forms of linguistic expression are recruited to meet earlier acquired communicative functions, while old functions are realized by new forms.