ABSTRACT
Starting from an assumption that children are active agents in their world, and that they make meaning both holistically and narratively, the theories discussed in this chapter situate all meaning in a social and cultural context which is ever-changing and therefore unique. The chapter explains that language can be viewed as a semiotic system through which meaning is made. The place of language is central to all of meaning-making situational context, as the central tool for the co-construction of knowledge, a resulting inter-subjectivity or joint understanding between communicators. Saussure is taken to be one of the founding fathers of structuralist semiotic theory and in his Course in General Linguistics he describes the communication of meaning as the construction and interpretation of 'signs'. The process of language as an exchange of meaning leading to a co-construction or inter-subjectivity can be argued to be a linear one, with each word following the next, not uttered simultaneously.
