Meaning, or social and material abstract action, is the common content of all languages, it is the base in relation to which languages function as elements of the plane of expression. Meaning is connected with its linguistic expression through an active linguistic norm and is transmitted thanks to this norm. Evald Ilyenkov wrote in his Considerations on the Relationship between Thinking and Language (1977):
“The ‘deep structures’ identified by Chomsky actually take shape in ontogenesis, in the process of a child’s development before he can speak and understand speech. And one does not have to be a Marxist to recognize their obvious, one might say, tangible reality in the form of sensorimotor schemes, i.e. schemes of the direct activity of a developing human being with things and in things in the form of a purely bodily phenomenon—the interaction of a body with other bodies located outside it. These sensorimotor schemes, as Piaget calls them, or ‘deep structures,’ as linguists prefer to call them, are precisely what philosophy has long called logical forms or forms of ‘thinking as such’” (Ilyenkov 2019-, vol. 5, pp. 243-4).
Can a human being understand things without using words? Can language be reduced to gestures and tactile sensations rather than words? Although the Zagorsk experiment on teaching deaf-blind children did not provide a definitive answer to this question, we are inclined to believe that this is probably impossible. Meanings and words are inextricably linked for humans.
Studying the language development of a child is a key to understanding the language development of all humanity. A child learns language through a socially activated plane of expression, saturated with active norms. Active norms in this case are sensorimotor schemes and the event models and action programs built on them: connections between symbols (words, gestures) and actions: “eat,” “drink,” “sleep,” “walk,” etc. A child is predisposed to internalize these connections.