... needs and to interact with others (marked by rising intonation). He goes on to describe in more detail the initial functions that language serves in interactions: instrumental (the child's demand for objects), regulatory (the child's demand that another person do something), interactional (such as greeting), personal (expression of personal feeling), heuristic (questions about the environment), and imaginative (for make-believe). Jakobson (1960) attempts to qualify the functions of language in a slightly different way, for example , the conative function (when messages are formed to produce the desired behaviour in the addressee), and the phatic (maintenance of the channel of communication). Functionalist theories are based on the premise that the child begins to learn a language in order to fulfil more efficiently these functions of communication, and that the child develops structures out of these functions. The intention to communicate is what provokes language in the first place, but McShane (1980) suggests ...

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