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The Acquisition of Referring Expressions: A dialogical approach
Edited by Anne Salazar-Orvig, Geneviève de Weck, Rouba Hassan and Annie Rialland
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 28] 2021
► pp. 204–232

Chapter 7
The influence of dialogue in young children’s uses of referring expressions

ORCID logo | Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
ORCID logo | Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
ORCID logo | Université de Lorraine
| Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3

Twenty-four dialogues between French-speaking children aged 1;10 to 2;6 and their more competent interlocutors were analyzed from the point of view of (1) the uses of referring expressions by both children and their interlocutors, according to the attentional and discursive status of the referent, (2) the immediate effect of the interlocutor’s discourse on the choice of a referring expression; and (3) the dialogical relations of referring expressions. The main results confirmed the similarity of adults’ and children’s uses of third-person pronouns and showed that maintaining continuity in dialogue overrode the influence of forms in the interlocutor’s discourse. Finally, a qualitative analysis highlighted the role of formats and more generally, patterns of dialogue in the language developmental process.

Keywords: dialogical relations, discursive status, attentional status, third-person clitic pronouns, nouns, demonstrative pronouns, formats, question, repetition, interlocutor’s discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Distribution and uses of referring expressions
    • 2.1The distribution of third-person pronouns, nouns, and demonstrative pronouns
    • 2.2Uses of referring expressions
  • 3.Towards a dialogical account
    • 3.1The immediate impact of the interlocutor’s discourse
      • 3.1.1Data analysis
        • Form and category of antecedents
        • Dialogical relations: Coding
        • Statistics
      • 3.1.2Results
        • Form and category of the interlocutor’s antecedents: Results
        • Dialogical relations: Results
      • 3.1.3Interaction between interlocutor’s antecedents, and dialogical relations
    • 3.2Patterns in dialogue
      • Immediate or distant uptake
      • Answering questions
      • Autonomous uses are anchored in previous sequences
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.28.07mar
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2023. The choice of referring expressions in adult-child dialogues. In Reference [Studies in Language Companion Series, 228], ► pp. 323 ff. DOI logo
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2021. Chapter 11. The acquisition of referring expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], DOI logo
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Vinel, Elise, Anne Salazar-Orvig, Geneviève de Weck, Salma Nashawati & Somayeh Rahmati
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Yamaguchi, Naomi, Anne Salazar-Orvig, Marine Le Mené, Stéphanie Caët & Annie Rialland
2021. Chapter 2. Filler syllables as precursors of referring expressions. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], ► pp. 42 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Chapter 11. The acquisition of referring expressions: From formal factors to communicative experience. In The Acquisition of Referring Expressions [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 28], ► pp. 320 ff. DOI logo

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