In addressing questions of semantics and grammar in child language, this study focuses on the generation of speech activity. Specific attention is on the formation and development of speech units during speech generation. The study looks at the process by which preschool children master various linguistic items and categories using semantics, highlighting word derivation and the way in which it serves to express particular formal-semantic relations with the help of grammatical and lexical semantic linguistic elements. Similarly, this also sheds light on children's acquisition of metaphorical meaning. Chapter 1 discusses the human capacity for language from the point of view of speech generation, chapter 2 deals with word derivation and speech generation, and chapter 3 treats the semantics of metaphor in speech generation. (186 Russian references; 36 English references) (CP)