There are many different ways of describing a series of events
in time; for instance, (a) X happened and, (then) I happened, (b) X
happened before Y happened, (c) Before Y happened. X happened, (d)
After X happened. Y happened. and (e) Y happened after X happened.
Three principles -- order of mention, derivational simplicity and
choice of theme -- are proposed to account for how adults choose temporal descriptions in various contexts. The principles are all supported by psychological and linguistic data. These three principles
serve as the basis for a developmental hypothesis which predicts the
order of appearance of the syntactic constructions used by young
children to describe events in temporal succession. It predicts that
the main stages that will appear in the children's descriptions during
an early period of language acquisition are, first, compound description
as in (a) above, then complex descriptions with a subordinate clause in
second position, as in (b) and (e), and lastly, complex descriptions
with the subordinate clause in first place, as in (c) and (d).This hypothesis is confirmed by data collected over a six-months
period from fifteen three-and-a-half year-old children, some of
whom had just begun to use temporal subordinate clauses in their speech.
The principal subordinate conjunctions that were used by the majority
of the children in this study are when, if and because, A number of
other temporal conjunctions also appeared but their use was not so
widespread.Developmentally, the notion of time seems to start with the
recognition that events happen at particular times (i.e. at lunchtime)
and to progress successively to the relating of these events simultaneous with, preceding and following each other. Evidence that
temporal subordinate clauses develop in this order is provided by the
types of temporal adverb and conjunction used in the very early stage
of language acquisition
