ABSTRACT
Infants engage with other people from birth. The ways in which they do so develop over the first months of life, leading up to language use. Early social interaction is multimodal and emotional. Yet, as I argue here, it is not just about emotion but creates the felt meaning upon which denotative linguistic meaning rests and that continues to organize language use throughout life. A protosemiosis is itself founded on both the musical organization of infants’ and adults’ expressions and sensori-motor experience giving rise to amodal contours of feeling in sound, as is exemplified by sound symbolism.
