The Microfunctions Of Protolanguage

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 612-3, 613n):

Children gradually build up an inventory of such proto-signs, and towards the end of the first year the signs begin to form systems, sets of contrasting terms in particular proto-semantic domains or micro-functions: typically, 

the instrumental (e.g. 'I want/I don't want'), 

regulatory (e.g. Do that!/ Do that!!'), 

interactional (e.g. I'm here/ where are you?'), and 

personal domains (e.g. 'I like that/ I'm curious about that'). 

These already foreshadow the semantic motifs of the adult language, the experiential and interpersonal metafunctions, although they are not in any direct correspondence with them; thus the "personal" signs expressing curiosity, or pleasure/ displeasure, constitute the beginning of the semiotic exploration of experience and open the way to naming and classifying phenomena, while the interactional signs are the ones whereby a child enacts social relationships with caregivers and others who are close (Halliday, 1975; 1984b). 

Here we see the earliest context for the later emergence of types of process within the grammar (Halliday, 1991). But the immediate significance of the protolanguage is that by acting semiotically in these particular contexts children construe the fundamental distinction between "self" and "other", and the further distinction of "other" into persons and objects (cf. the discussion and figure in Halliday, 1978b). The consciousness of the self arises at the intersection of the various semiotic roles defined by each of these systems² — as well as, of course, from awareness of being one interactant in the general dialogic process (Halliday, 1991).

 

² There is a sense in which these roles anticipate the functions in the transitivity structure of the clause: proto-Beneficiary (instrumental), proto-Agent (regulatory), proto-Carrier (interactional), and proto-Senser (personal).