Metalanguage is the vital factor of any verbal development. The
interpretation of one linguistic sign through other, in some respects
homogeneous, signs of the same language, is a metalingual operation
which plays an essential role in child language learning. Observations
made during recent decades, in particular by the Russian inquirers A. N.
Gvozdev and K. I. Cukovskij, have disclosed what an enormous place talk
about language occupies in the verbal behavior of preschool children,
who are prone to compare new acquisitions with earlier ones and their
own way of speaking with the diverse forms of speech used by [121] the
older and younger people surrounding them; the makeup and choice of
words and sentences, their sound, shape and meaning, synonymy and
homonymy are vividly discussed. A constant recourse to metalanguage is
indispensable both for a creative assimilation of the mother tongue and
for its final mastery.
METALANGUAGE AS A LINGUISTIC PROBLEM by Roman Jakobson Selected Writings, VII. Edited by S. Rudy. Mouton, 1985 (pp. 113-121)
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