ABSTRACT
And this line of thought seems to stand up well when we look at what actually happens. Thus, children learn ‘you’ (and relatedly ‘I’) in situations like the following. A child toddles up to her carer, pulls on a knee and holds up her arms. The carer says ‘Do you want to sit on my lap?’ and the child is lifted on to the lap. Or the carer says ‘I’ll give you a piece of my apple if you’ll give me piece of your cake. Is that cake for me? Oh how kind!’ And so on. Given enough of this sort of thing, the child learns that the want that she had when she pulled on the knee and raised her arms is linguistically expressed as ‘I want to sit on your lap’ and that an appropriate remark when offering the cake would have been ‘Here’s some cake for you’. These contexts, of sitting on laps, sharing meals and the like, are not contexts for learning ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘that person’, at least not as words for the person providing the lap or the person sitting on it to refer to each other or for the persons sharing the meal to refer to each other. The carer does not say ‘Does that child want to sit on my lap?’ to his or her own toddler pulling on the knee. A context for that remark would instead be one of the carer speaking to the carer’s child about some child strange to them both, impertinently pulling on the knee. A carer addressing his or her own child with ‘Does that child want to sit on my lap?’ can at best be construed as making a joke, for example, a temporary pretence of not recognising the child. If not a joke, the utterance would be pathologically odd.6
