The development of sentential complements in Greek, a language with systematic use of two complementizers, is studied in a corpus of spontaneous conversations by one girl and her family in the age range of 1;8 to 4 years. Formal, semantic and pragmatic analyses of child and child-directed constructions indicate parallels and divergences from previous acquisition research. Early formal marking of complements suggests ambient language effects. Yet, emergence of semantically/pragmatically more prototypical ones is protracted, favoring usage-based and semantically motivated explanations. The data also contribute to the theoretical description of sentential complement constructions, by charting some of their varieties and also suggesting explanations for the relations holding among these varieties.

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Theoretical claims about typologically constrained differences in how speakers habitually describe physical motion are tested through three cross-linguistic developmental studies. Three types of data are analyzed in Greek and English, languages here characterized respectively as Verb- and Satellite-framed in the coding of motion: spontaneous conversations between adults and children aged 1;8–4;6 as well as two types of narratives elicited through pictures and a film from 4-, 7-, 10-year olds and adults. Results show, on the one hand, largely predictable cross-linguistic differences, with overall greater attention paid to manner in English than in Greek and different patterns for coding path. On the other hand, the very appearance as well as intensity of typological effects also depend upon various interacting factors: the precise ways of measuring them, the age of speakers, type, content and communicative exigencies of the discourse as well as the detailed structural characteristics of a language.