ABSTRACT New work on the study of pragmatics has begun to address its relation to syntactic development. We have identified three ways to investigate this issue: (a) contrastive study of the differential developmental histories of given grammatical forms across different contexts as a first step towards isolating the crucial contexts for the forms and discovering the early interactional and ideational meanings to which they are tied; (b) discovery of children's units of discourse organization and interaction through contrastive study of related grammatical forms; (c) study of crucial contexts (e.g., replies, arguments) to discover the grammatical markers arising in these contexts. Study Area I concers the development of causal constructions, examining the claim that causal expressions first arise as expressions justifying speech acts (Pragmatic Causal Expressions) and only later become used to explain physical events (Mathetic Causal Expressions). Study Area II investigates the discourse features controlling the contrastive use of different temporal, causal, tag, and question forms, and also examines the relevant form-function mappings cross- linguistically. Study Area III examines the development of verb ellipsis and modal auxilliaries within two given discourse contexts, replies and arguments, since these forms appear frequently within these contexts. These studies are intended to inform the issue of how children use communicative functions as guides in acquiring the grammatical categories of their language.
