metalinguistics

"...we practice metalanguage without realizing the metalingual character of our operations. Whenever the addresser and/or the
addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is focused on the code: it performs a METALINGUAL (ie, glossing) function. "I don't follow you - what do you mean?" asks the addressee, or in Shakesperaen diction, "What is't thou say'st?" And the addresser in anticipation of usch recapturing question inquires: "Do you know what I mean?" Imagine such an exasperating dialogue: "The sophomore was plucked." "But what is plucked?" "Plucked means the same as flunked." "And flunked?" "To be flunked is to faile an exam." "And what is sophomore?" persists the interrogator innocent of school vocabulary. "A sophomore is a second-year student." All these equational sentences voney information merely about the lexical code
of English; their function is strictly metalingual. Any process of language lerning, in particular child acquisition of the mother tongue, makes wide use of such metalingual operations; and aphasia may often be defined as a loss of ability for metalingual operations."