Professor M A K Halliday has been enriching the discipline of linguistics with his keen insights into the social semiotic phenomenon we call language. This ten-volume series presents his seminal works. This fourth volume contains sixteen papers that look at the development of early childhood language. They are presented in three parts.

Part One: Infancy and Protolanguage; 1. Representing the Child as a Semiotic Being; 2. Learning How to Mean; 3. Early Language Learning: A Sociolinguistic Approach; 4. A Sociosemiotic Perspective on Language Development; 5. Meaning and the Construction of Reality in Early Childhood; 6. The Ontogenesis of Dialogue; Part Two: Transition from Child Tongue to Mother Tongue; 7. Into the Adult Language; 8. The Contribution of Developmental Linguistics to the Interpretation of Language as a System; 9. On the Transition from Child Tongue to Mother Tongue; 10. A Systemic-Functional Interpretation of the Nature and Ontogenesis of Dialogue; 11. The Place of Dialogue in Children's Construction of Meaning; Part Three: Early Language and Learning; 12. Relevant Models of Language; 13. The Social Context of Language Development; 14. Three Aspects of Children's Language Development: Learning Language, Learning through Language, Learning about Language; 15. Towards a Language-Based Theory of Learning; 16. Grammar and the Construction of Educational Knowledge.

The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday is a series that brings together Halliday's publications in many branches of linguistics, both theoretical and applied (a distinction which he himself rejects), including grammar and semantics, discourse analysis and stylistics, phonology, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, language education, and child language development.