This chapter addresses the ways that temperament and personality traits and coping develop and mutually affect each other throughout childhood and adolescence. The associations between personality traits and coping are typically modest in size, although the links may be stronger in childhood than later in life. Research on normative patterns suggests that, across both domains, children experience growth in self-regulation in middle childhood, followed by a dip in self-regulation in early adolescence, and then gradual improvements in later adolescence. Temperament and personality traits, stress, and coping may be related through five processes: traits affect exposure to stressors; traits affect youth’s appraisal of stressors; traits shape which coping strategies youth use; traits and coping interact to shape adaptation; and chronic use of coping strategies may affect trait development. Finally, narrative identity may also play an important part in helping young people cope with stress and adversity starting in adolescence.

One of the foundational claims of attachment theory is that an important function of early relationships is to support a child’s use of an adult to appropriately regulate emotions in times of stress (Ainsworth et al., 1978/2015). In this chapter, we review evidence that attachment behavior in infancy, and attachment security in adolescence and adulthood, are associated with adaptive coping, defined as volitional strategies for managing stress. Overall, it appears that more secure attachments are associated with more adaptive coping behaviors. However, this review of the literature suggests that various forms of insecure attachment do not appear to differentially predict maladaptive coping behaviors. Furthermore, although some limited research shows that infant attachment is associated with coping behaviors, it is unclear whether the constructs of attachment behavior and coping in infancy and early childhood are truly distinct. Implications for future research and the importance of theoretical refinement are discussed.

We explain how a systems conceptualization scaffolds our understanding of the development of coping. First, we describe five developmental systems ideas that open pathways for examining age-graded changes and transformations in coping from infancy through adolescence. A systems conceptualization: (1) defines coping as action regulation under stress; (2) ties coping to basic adaptive tasks; (3) locates the study of coping between regulation and resilience; (4) views coping as hierarchically structured families of action types; and (5) holds that coping comprises an integrated multi-level system that emerges on the levels of action but incorporates both underlying neurophysiological and psychological subsystems and overarching interpersonal and societal contexts. Second, we describe six ways the coping system undergoes successive reorganizations as the coping equipment available to individuals changes with age. We show how children are active participants in the construction of coping tools, the emergence and consolidation of which depend on social partners and encounters with stressors. At every age, qualitative developmental shifts allow coping appraisals and actions to become more effectively calibrated to internal capacities and external affordances, better coordinated with other people, and guided by increasingly autonomous values and goals. We end with implications of this view for translation to practice.

The concept of accommodative coping refers to a "family" of processes by which goal blockages, losses, and similar threats to quality of life are coped with by adjusting individual goal and valuation structures, i.e., in particular by devaluing or "letting go" of threatened or blocked goals and upgrading and pursuing alternative, more attainable goals in their place. While the functionality of accommodative regulatory processes in older and older adulthood has long been elaborated theoretically in several compatible modeling approaches and well studied empirically, accommodative processes in childhood and adolescence have only recently attracted scientific attention. It is helpful here to distinguish the efficacy of accommodative processes in childhood and adolescence itself from the developmental conditions for accommodative processes in adulthood and old age. Combining these perspectives opens up the prospect of an actual lifespan perspective on developmental regulation.

The significant biological, psychological, and social reorganization that occurs across adolescence lays the groundwork for both normative patterns of change as well as emerging individual differences in how youth respond to increasing exposure to stressors in their environment during this formative stage of life. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive summary regarding changes in the psychological and behavioral components of stress responses across adolescence and the pubertal transition as well as the associated patterns of maturation in relevant physiological systems, including brain structure and function, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. A focus is placed on understanding both advances in stress responses as well as ways in which stress responses may become disrupted during this critical developmental stage, with an eye toward identifying characteristics of youth or their experiences that predict diverging developmental trajectories in responses to stress during this stage of risk and opportunity.

This chapter describes the development, refinement, and key guiding insights of the Reformulated Adaptation to Poverty-Related Stress (APRS) model. The APRS model elucidates how children (and adults) cope with and adapt to the plethora of stressful exposures and conditions that comprise poverty’s developmental context, and why coping in this stressful context often differs from coping found in less stressful developmental contexts. The chapter articulates implications of the APRS for research that takes context seriously and for interventions that meet children where they are; help them grow broad, flexible coping repertoires; develop the ability to differentiate among domains of stress that require different coping approaches; and learn to tailor one’s coping responses to the type of stressor being encountered. In this way, the APRS can guide researchers and interventionists to dump the deficit model of poor people and embrace the possibilities opened by an appreciation for the remarkable adaptiveness of humans.

This chapter deals with the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) approach to extraction restrictions, or island constraints. The cross-linguistic and language-internal (i.e. cross-constructional) variation in extraction restrictions is captured in RRG in terms of how deeply into sentence structure assertion may be represented. Some languages allow the potential focus domain to reach individual constituents in both complement and adverbial subordinate clauses, with consequences on the extractability of such constituents. One such case is Japanese, a more permissive language than English, which provides the main case study discussed in the chapter.

This chapter discusses argument structure alternations capitalizing on the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) notions of logical structure, macrorole and privileged syntactic argument assignment, and linking. A distinction is drawn between lexical and syntactic processes. The lexical alternations (for example, causativization and anticausativization) are often limited in productivity and serve to enrich the lexicon. The syntactic alternations (for example, passivization and antipassivization) are characterized by mappings between the lexical and the syntactic levels, and may play an important role in referent tracking or topic continuity.

This chapter provides a grammatical sketch of Yimas, a morphologically highly complex polysynthetic language spoken in the Sepik basin region of the northern swampy lowlands of Papua New Guinea. The chapter discusses the extensively elaborated word structure of Yimas and the non-configurational property of its clauses, which lack the familiar syntactic category of phrases. Particular emphasis is placed on the system of agreement on the two principal word classes of the language, nouns and verbs, transitivity and macrorole assignment, alignment, clause linkage and nominalizations.

This chapter offers an in-depth discussion of semantic macroroles and macrorole assignment in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). In the first part, the RRG theory of thematic relations is discussed in the context of a brief history of theta roles and generalized semantic roles. The second part turns to the role of Aktionsart, semantic and syntactic transitivity, and causativity in macrorole assignment. Although the focus of the chapter is on standard RRG, the third part of the chapter discusses alternative approaches, concerning the number of macroroles that should be postulated and the semantic features that are relevant to macrorole assignment.

This chapter discusses the place of inflectional and derivational morphology in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). After describing how inflection is encoded in the layered structure of the word, the chapter offers an explanatory account of the factors that motivate inflectional marking. The functional orientation of RRG presupposes a view of morphology distributed throughout the different components of the grammatical model. Additionally, the typological commitment of RRG requires paying close attention to the role of inflectional processes not only in dependent-marking languages but also in head-marking languages, since the interface between inflectional morphology and syntax is much tighter in the latter type of language. The chapter then reflects on word formation as a lexicological process which involves the interaction of lexical semantics and morphology. The approach to derivational morphology can be said to be markedly motivated by semantics.

This chapter proposes a functional theory of language acquisition based on the idea that children utilize their understanding of cognitive and communicative principles to construct a grammar that integrates semantic and pragmatic notions. The chapter explores child language data that are relevant to such issues as how layered clause structure, operator projection, predicate structure and grammatical relations are acquired within a communication-and-cognition framework. In showing how the language acquisition data map to the Role and Reference Grammar framework, the chapter includes contrasts with alternative theories, such as autonomous syntax theory. From the perspective of conceptual development, the infant-toddler is viewed as a relatively proficient information processor with the capacity to discover fundamental linguistic relationships, in the spirit of the theory of Operating Principles (Slobin 1985).