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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. 320–345

Chapter 11
The acquisition of referring expressions: From formal factors to communicative experience

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

This last chapter undertakes a general discussion of the results presented in Chapters 2 to 10. After recalling the overall distribution of referring expressions in the data of toddlers (age 1;7 to 2;6) and older children (age 3;6 to 7;5), we review the impact of formal factors (syntactic functions, lexicon, constructions), discourse-pragmatic factors (the referent type and its status in the discourse) and socio-discursive and dialogical factors (activity, speech genre, social and interactional setting and dialogue) on the use of referring expressions. More than each factor taken separately, their interaction accounted for the children’s and the adult’s uses of these expressions. Moreover, both the child and adult uses were strongly determined by the socio-discursive and dialogical context. These results thus appear to offer a consistent set of arguments in favor of a dialogical account of the process whereby children acquire and use referring expressions, one that should not only consider forms and cognitive development but also the way children experience forms in various meaningful and dialogical contexts.

Keywords: referring expressions, dialogical approach, discourse-pragmatic factors, syntactic function, activity, speech genre, social and interactional settings, dialogue, nouns, pronouns
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overall distribution of referring expressions
  • 3.The interaction of formal and discourse-pragmatic factors
    • 3.1Formal factors
    • 3.2Discourse-pragmatic factors
      • 3.2.1The influence of the referent’s characteristics on the use of referring expressions
      • 3.2.2The impact of the referent’s status in the discourse
    • 3.3How do formal and discourse-pragmatic factors interact?
  • 4.Communicative experience and dialogue
    • 4.1Activities and use of referring expressions
    • 4.2The impact of speech genre
    • 4.3The influence of social setting
    • 4.4The influence of the interactional setting: Towards reconsidering models
    • 4.5Reference in the dynamics of dialogue
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.28.11sal
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