This study documents the spontaneous use of two deictic verbs, sau ‘to come’ and 'aumai ‘to bring/give’, in the speech of young Samoan children. A major goal of this account is to demonstrate that patterns in young children's language production must be assessed not only in terms of grammatical properties, but also in terms of pragmatic properties as evidenced in spontaneous speech. Deictic verbs are viewed here from two perspectives: as forms that refer to or indicate certain semantic relationships between persons and objects in the speech context and as forms that, when used in a particular context, constitute (wholly or partially) social acts interpreted in particular ways by the speech community.