The spontaneous use of two deictic forms in the speech of Samoan children was examined. Recordings were made of four Samoan children interacting with their families at monthly intervals over a ten-month period. The children were approximately 2 years old at the start of the study. The speech elements examined were the particles signifying "toward" and "away from." The purpose of the analysis was to show that directional terms indicating movement toward are more congruent with children's early understanding of spatial relations than are terms indicating movement away from. The data demonstrated how deictic particles in Samoan are used to refer to a variety of semantic relations that may or may not involve a metaphorical extension of the notions of movement toward and movement away from. The semantic relations seemed to be more explicitly grammaticized in Samoan than in other languages. Children's reference to these semantic relations was constrained by their preference for expressing movement toward and their preference for encoding action relations rather than state relations. (RW)