ABSTRACT
What I shall be discussing is how the human infant learns to use language in a fashion that meets the requirements of social living as a member of a culture-using species. To succeed at such living requires far more than that one speak in well-formed sentences, or that one’s words and sentences meet the requirements of reference and meaning and truth-testability. To speak, rather, requires that one’s utterances meet criteria of conventional appropriateness or felicity not only with respect to the context in which speech occurs, but also to the acts of those with whom one is involved in dialogue. If I say Italy is a boot, the sentence may be well formed, but it is quite unclear whether it is true or false, useful or useless, appropriate or inappropriate unless you know to whom it is addressed and under what circumstances (see, for example, Grice, 1968). To anyone conversant with the debates in linguistics and linguistic philosophy over the last 15 years — ever since John Austin first introduced those matters — this will all have a very commonsensical and familar ring. It is quite plain, of course, that language fulfills various communicative functions — whatever view one wishes to take of such functions (compare Halliday, 1975, and Dore, 1975). But how are communicative functions progressively realized in the life of very young children and how does early nonlinguistic interaction between mother and child provide a matrix for the acquisition of language? Once one examines the detail of early language acquisition, how the child goes from prelinguistic communication to the early mastery of language, it should come as no surprise that later, the question How would you feel about a breath of fresh air? is not interpreted as inquiring into one’s naive theory of respiratory physiology but as an invitation to go for a walk.
