ABSTRACT
During the two-word phase, therefore, children become capable of expressing a relatively wide range of different meaning relations. They have begun the crucial enterprise of making sense in words of their everyday world in communication with others. The kinds of meaning relation entailed in these developments are sometimes referred to as ideational (see Halliday, 1975, 1978) – a term used usually more particularly to describe that aspect of the adult language system concerned with expressing and giving shape to events and the external world and of the internal world of consciousness. In taking over the representational properties of speech, by using it to enact notions of action, agency, quantity, possession and so forth, the child is thus moving into the ideational sphere of the adult system, and is thereby significantly transcending the limitations of the earlier protolanguage.
