Young children often lack words for what they want to talk about. To fill the gaps in their lexicon, they coin new words. They rely on compounding and derivation to do this. This means identifying and analyzing parts of words – roots or stems, and affixes – and learning their meanings, as well as which combinations are possible. Some languages favor compounding and some derivation in word formation. Children are sensitive to which options are the most productive and adopt those first. Two-year-olds offer analyses of word meanings, as in running-stick (I run with it) or high-chair (it is high), and provide analyses of novel compounds where they take account of language structure (head noun first in Hebrew, second in English). They also analyze derived forms with agentive endings. They start to produce novel words from as young as age two, whether compounds in Germanic languages, or derived forms in Romance and Semitic. They begin with simple forms (minimal or no change to the root), advance to compound or derived word forms that are transparent in meaning, and opt for the most productive options in the adult language, with the goal of finding the right words to convey the child-speaker’s meaning.

Emblematic gestures (or emblems) have several denominations in the literature (for instance autonomous, quotable, semiotic, folkloric or symbolic gestures). Emblems are culture-bound gestures; they differ interculturally and intraculturally, both among different cultural and linguistic areas, and among individuals and social groups within the same culture. These gestures are easily translated into verbal language, they are quotable; they are equivalent to utterances, and in many cases, they have names. Typical emblems are used – alongside or without words – for greetings, insults or mockery, to indicate places or people (deictics), to refer to the state of a person (to be drunk, to be asleep …), to give interpersonal orders or to represent actions (to eat, to drink, etc.). Many emblems show a clear perlocutionary component (to offer, to threaten, to promise or to swear …). The tradition in the study of emblems has always emphasized their autonomy from speech (they are interpretable with a high level of context independence). Moreover, emblematic capacity can be regarded as associated with illocutionary force, which is one of the most characteristic features of these units.

Chapter 2 begins by examining the correspondence between lovers Toxilus and Lemniselenis, using it to further investigate the metatheatrical dynamics of written correspondence on the Plautine stage and to consider the love letter qua category of epistolary writing. Next, it considers the ruse enacted via forgery. Relying on the same letter-as-script and letter-as-scheme metaphor active in Bacchides, Persa establishes an association between writing and belief to meditate on the nature of theatrical illusion. This chapter continues, then, to unpack the synergy between performance and text in Plautus but it focuses on the other end of the epistolary and dramatic processes via analysis of Persa’s onstage reading scene, which generates a simultaneously theatrical and anti-theatrical vision of an actor reading his lines on stage. Finally, I concentrate on Persa’s deception which replicates the content of the larger play it inhabits, delving deeper into the mechanics of mise-en-abymes to show how Plautus employs embedded text and internal dramaturgy to address the problem of creative originality, prompting us to question whose play we are watching.