In Memory of Professor Grace Wales Shugar: Introduction to the Special Issues on “children’s Language and Communicative Knowledge”

This past summer, on August 19, 2013, Professor Grace Wales Shugar passed away in Warsaw. Although Canadian (born on May 10, 1918 in Montreal), she spent almost her entire research career in Poland, where she lived from 1952. She was founder and leader of the Warsaw School of Developmental Psycholinguistics, and lectured at many universities in different countries. She was invited to deliver a plenary lecture at the 4th Interna tional Congress for the Study of Child Language in Lund (Sweden) in 1987. The subject of her lecture was “The nature of peer discourse: Participant structures for and by children”. This paper is an outline of Grace Wales Shugar’s research approach and some of her main theses in the field of language acquisition and children’s discourse. Her idea of dual agentivity of adult-child interaction shows how to best support children’s communicative skills: It is only when children can show what they know in their own way, and when that child knowledge is received and used in a discourse process, that we can expect a child’s inner motivation to acquire knowledge from others to be maintained and to become a driving force of the child’s further development (Shugar, 1995, p. 233).