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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. 288–316

Chapter 10
The impact of speech genres on the use of referring expressions

ORCID logo | Université Paris 8 – Vincennes-Saint-Denis
ORCID logo | Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
ORCID logo | Université de Neuchâtel
ORCID logo | Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
ORCID logo | Université de Neuchâtel

This chapter is aimed to assess the impact of speech genre on the use of referring expressions. We examined this impact in two corpora of mother-child dialogues (toddlers, ages 1;10–2;6 years and older children ages 4–7 years) via two separate studies. The first study showed that among the toddlers, the discursive sequence and the utterance genre influenced the use of referring expression more strongly than the position in the referential chain. In the second study, which looked at the narrative sequences in both corpora, we observed two phenomena: firstly, demonstrative expressions were relatively independent of the position in the referential chain, with genre overriding position; secondly, position in the referential chain took precedence for the noun-pronoun opposition, a key factor in how characters are handled in a narrative. However, the results also showed that the position factor interacted with both genre and age. The discussion deals with the implications of these findings for understanding children’s first uses of referring expressions.

Keywords: children, demonstrative pronouns, discursive sequences, interaction setting, joint story-telling, nouns, referential chain, speech genre, third-person pronouns, utterance genre
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1What do we mean by speech genres?
    • 1.2How do speech genres affect language development?
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants and data collection
    • 2.2Coding
      • 2.2.1Categories of referring expressions
      • 2.2.2Discursive sequences
      • 2.2.3Utterance genres
      • 2.2.4Position in the referential chain
      • 2.2.5Intercoder agreement and statistics
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Distribution of referring expressions
    • 3.2Impact of discursive sequence, utterance genre, and position in the referential chain among toddlers
      • 3.2.1Impact of discursive sequence
      • 3.2.2Impact of utterance genre
      • 3.2.3Impact of the position in the referential chain
      • 3.2.4Joint impact of discursive sequence, utterance genre, and position in the referential chain
    • 3.3Impact of utterance genre and position in the referential chain in narrative sequences, for the two corpora
      • 3.3.1Impact of utterance genre
      • 3.3.2Impact of the position in the referential chain
      • 3.3.3Joint impact of utterance genre and position in the referential chain in the narrative sequences of the two corpora
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.28.10vin
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[no author supplied]
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