I have argued that language is best understood as a system of communication and that the meaning of a term is most appropriately explicated by an account of what can be done with it. This conception of language and meaning leads to a view of children's language development that focuses on how children use language in order to communicate. Thus far, the argument has been presented in very general terms. It remains to develop a model of language which is sufficiently elaborated to serve as a guide for the study of child language.

With the aim of presenting a model of child language, the chapter begins with a discussion of the philosophy of speech-acts. As a comprehensive attempt to analyze the communicative functions performed by language, it offers various typologies of speech activity which may guide the description of children's language usage. A careful consideration of speech-act theory, however, suggests that the functions utterances perform can only be fully understood by considering how these utterances are positioned in the context of particular language games or conversations. This leads to a discussion of issues in the analysis of conversation in the second part of the chapter. When conversing, people interact in a variety of ways, they employ a variety of strategies for realizing their intentions, and they draw on a pool of shared background knowledge in order to understand one another.