Redescribing early pragmatics

Developmental work on ostensive communication calls for reconsidering existing theoretical accounts within a comprehensive framework of early pragmatics and its development. In this paper, we propose a new perspective on the ontogeny and development of ostensive communication as underpinned by a process of knowledge and representational redescription. By discussing relevant empirical data, we ground early pragmatics on in‐built principles of implicit knowledge that are redescribed during communicative development, shedding new light on the representations underlying infant ostensive communication and its development into rich pragmatic knowledge involving complex intentions and metarepresentations.