ABSTRACT
This chapter has three goals. The first is to draw attention to the distinction between meaning that is public, shared, and conventionally constructed in language, on the one hand, and meaning that is private, personal, and mentally constructed, on the other hand. The second goal is to show how private, personal, mentally constructed meanings exist before language is acquired. And the third goal is to argue that infants acquire language in the effort to express and articulate these private meanings so as to make them public. Children learn syntax and semantics together by learning the verbs of the language and the configurations in which the arguments of the verb can appear. Attributing meaning to children’s speech has been a relatively conservative enterprise so far. It is that infants acquire the public conventional meanings of language in the effort to express and articulate the private personal meanings they have in mind.
