The Proceedings of the 31st Stanford
Child Language Research Forum

Space In Language
Location, Motion, Path, and Manner

Center for the Study of Language & Information
Stanford University

Editor: Eve V. Clark 
2002 CSLI Publications 

Editor's Note

With this meeting, the Stanford Child Language Forum moved to a new format. Future meetings (on a two-year schedule rather than the previous annual basis) will focus on a specific topic in first language acquisition. Because the answers to many questions in acquisition depend on the language being acquired, we draw on cross-linguistic data whenever possible. The topic for this meeting was 'Space in Language'--how children go about learning to talk about position and motion, self-induced motion and caused motion; how they learn to convey motion, path, and manner, as well as the details of static position or location in space. The program drew on a large number of languages whose acquisition is being studied by researchers from many countries. Languages represented at the meeting included Arrernte, Danish, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Marquesan, Portuguese, Spanish, Tzeltal, and Zapotec. We owe special thanks to Dan I. Slobin (UC Berkeley) and his fellow-participants, Melissa Bowerman, Penelope Brown, Sonja Eisenbeiss, and Bhuvana Narasimhan, for planning the Friday evening Symposium.

The 2002 CLRF Organizing Committee--John Beavers, Michelle M. Chouinard, Ashwini Deo, Joy C. Geren, Vikram Jaswal, Barbara F. Kelly, Jean-Philippe Marcotte, Elizabeth A. Micks, Daniela O'Neill, Deena Skolnick, Rebecca Williamson, and Andrew Wong--did the general planning, publicity, and selection of the abstracts for presentations at the meeting. Ashwini Deo and Barbara Kelly produced the meeting handbook; John Beavers, Jean-Philippe Marcotte, Rebecca Williamson, and Andrew Wong organized the food and refreshments for the coffee breaks and the Friday evening reception; Michelle Chouinard and Joy Geren organized registration, and Vikram Jaswal and Deena Skolnick planned and set up the book display. The Organizing Committee is also indebted to the chairs of the paper sessions, those staffing the registration table and the book display, those helping with the refreshments, and everyone else who lent a hand to bring about the 2002 Forum on 'Space in Language'. This meeting is made possible by the invaluable support of the staff in Linguistics: Natalie Mendoza, Socorro (Coco) Relova and Allen Sciutto; and at CSLI: Michele King and Najwa Salame. We also thank Byron Reeves, Keith Devlin, and the Cognitive Science Committee at CSLI for their financial support of this meeting.

-- Eve V. Clark

Hard copy: All the papers submitted to the CLRF-2002 Proceedings are available in pdf format, to be viewed and printed with Adobe Acrobat

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