The CHILDES search I was attempting to perform in class was a combo search with these parameters, from the Eng-USA/Brown/Eve/ directory:

+s"time^away" +t*MOT +w2 -w2 eve19.cha

You can go to the CHILDES transcript browser, select “combo” in the popup menu, copy and paste the command above into the text box, and press “Run.”

Or, if you just want to see the result: http://tinyurl.com/evepassingtime.

Roger Brown commented on this early on in his book as well.

It’s probably funnier when it comes up as a search result for something else you were looking for.

If the source text isn’t familiar to you, you can try substituting “+t*CHI” in for “+t*MOT” in the command above to see Eve, earlier in the transcript, running through the more canonical words to this relatively well-known American folk song.