The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of deictic reference in the speech of 19 three-year-old Black children. The deictic verbs of motion are examined with reference to other aspects of the deictic system. The data for this study are approximately eight hours of spontaneous speech collected in a pre-school classroom. The hypothesis to be investigated is that "go" and "take" are more frequent than "come" and "bring" in the speech of children at this age, due to two sets of feature constraints on "come" and "bring," which are discussed. Reasons for believing that the child first learns the core meaning of a lexical item within a semantic field and only later acquires the derived meaning are offered. Use is made of certain concepts from Piagetian psychology in describing how the deictic system functions for the child. A justification for the use of these concepts is provided. The importance of the study is two-fold: it explores the appropriateness of Fillmore's description of deictic verbs for child language, and attempts to establish certain characteristics of the deictic system in child language, an area that has been neglected in linguistic research to date. (Author/CLK)