This research was conducted to determine how temporal adverbs become integrated into evolving temporal systems. During the period from 2;4 to 3;2, the utterances of three Polish children which contained temporal adverbs were classified as specifying reference time prior to, simultaneous with, or subsequent to speech time. This relationship between reference time and speech time was found either to contradict or to correspond to the relationship established between event time and speech time. The following three sets of adverbs emerged: immediate, e.g., 'already', cyclic, e.g., 'tomorrow', and remote, e.g., 'long ago'. The order of emergence was first immediate, then cyclic, and then remote. Contradictions were restricted to the cyclic set. Hence it was argued that contradictions do not represent a disruption in the systematic development of temporal systems.
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