ABSTRACT
Fundamental to communication is the capacity both to articulate intentions in such a manner that they are understood by a listener and to interpret the intentions of those addressing us. When we consider the emergence oflanguage in young children, we document the development of this capacity. Until recently, this documentation took the form of a description of the child's utterance; we would ask questions such as: Is the utterance single-or multi-word? Does the utterance display formal organization, i.e. use of word order, inflection? (Bloom, 1970; Bowerman, 1973). Is the utterance a directive, a description, a piece of sound play, or what? (Bloom, 1970; Ervin-Tripp, 1976;see also Chapter 1), In all of these endeavours, the investigator treats the utterance as a viable unit in much the same way as the sentence is a viable unit in adult speech behaviour. The child is portrayed as encoding ideas or propositions into utterances in roughly the same manner as the adult encodes propositions or ideas into sentences. The utterance may correspond more or less perfectly with the comparable adult sentence.
