Haydée Marcos

Anne Salazar Orvig

Christine Da Silva- Genest

Julien Heurdier

The influence of dialogue in young children's uses of referring expressions

Keywords: Dialogical relations, discursive status, attentional status, third-person clitic pronouns, nouns, demonstrative pronouns, formats, question, repetition, interlocutor's discourse

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.

Introduction

This chapter is about the role of dialogue in young children's acquisition of pragmatic skills for using referring expressions, with a special focus on thirdperson pronouns1 . After comparing the children's uses of referring expressions according to the referent's attentional and discursive status to their interlocutor's uses, the role of dialogue is considered from three perspectives: (a) Does the interlocutor's discourse have an immediate impact on the children's choice of referring expressions? (b) Do these referring expressions appear preferentially in certain dialogical relations? (c) Can we identify specific dialogical patterns that account for the acquisition of early pragmatic skills.

According to cognitive approaches to reference, the choice of a referring expression strongly depends on the accessibility of the referent [START_REF] Ariel | Accessing noun-phrase antecedents[END_REF] or, in another theoretical perspective, of its givenness [START_REF] Gundel | Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse[END_REF]. Accessibility is related to the referent's cognitive status in the addressee's assumed mental model of the situation. The referring expression the speaker uses orients the addressee's interpretation and referent retrieval. Studies in experimental settings have shown that young children have trouble adopting the addressee's viewpoint [START_REF] Campbell | Factors affecting young children's use of pronouns as referring expressions[END_REF][START_REF] Matthews | The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expressions[END_REF]Wittek and Tomasello, 2005). Yet children as young as age 2 are able to adjust their choice of referring expressions to the referents' status in the conversation. According to studies of various typologically different languages [START_REF] Allen | A discourse-pragmatic explanation for argument representation in child Inuktitut[END_REF][START_REF] Gundel | Children's use of referring expressions in spontaneous discourse: Implications for theory of mind development[END_REF][START_REF] Hughes | The effect of individual discoursepragmatic features on referential choice in child English[END_REF]Salazar Orvig et al., 2010a;[START_REF] Skarabela | Signs of early social cognition in children's syntax: The case of joint attention in argument realization in child Inuktitut[END_REF]da Silva-Genest, Salazar Orvig, Marcos, Caët, and Heurdier, Chapter 3, this volume, and Rezzonico, Vinel, de Weck, Hassan, and Salagnac, Chapter 4, this volume), this ability pertains to the contrast between overt and covert forms, and weak and strong forms (e.g. clitic pronouns and verbal inflections vs. strong personal and demonstrative pronouns). Moreover, children's uses of referring expressions appear to be similar to their caregivers' and to reflect the conventions of their particular language [START_REF] Guerriero | The development of referential choice in English and Japanese: a discourse-pragmatic perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Huang | Referential choice and informativeness in mother-child conversation: A focus on the mother[END_REF][START_REF] Hughes | The effect of individual discoursepragmatic features on referential choice in child English[END_REF][START_REF] Paradis | Subject realization and crosslinguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: What is the role of the input?[END_REF].

In spite of this convergence of results, there are divergences as to the explanations given of the developmental process through which children grasp the values and uses of referring expressions. Formal and nativist approaches refer almost exclusively to cognitive development to account for this acquisition (see [START_REF] De Cat | The cognitive underpinnings of referential abilities[END_REF]. In contrast, constructivist and interactionist approaches are challenged by this early competence. In this chapter we aim to show that children's participation in dialogue contributes to their acquisition of the ability to use referring expressions in terms of the accessibility or givenness of the referent.

According to some authors, the use of referring expressions partly depends on the interlocutors' immediately preceding utterances, via the questions they ask or via priming or repetition (see section 3). We will begin by examining our data from this perspective (see § 3.1). However, we contend that even though the models and structures provided by the adults' utterances are undoubtedly at the core of acquisition, their "effectiveness" is explained by the fact they form part of "language games" (Wittgenstein, 1953), whereby the child has the opportunity to grasp not only the forms but also, and essentially, their contexts of use in dialogue. Our hypothesis is based on the premise that adult-child dialogues are partly organized into "formats" [START_REF] Bruner | From communication to language: a psychological perspective[END_REF](Bruner, , 1983a) characterized by recurrent patterns in which the reciprocation of participant's roles takes place. Furthermore, in these contexts, adults scaffold children's contributions by adjusting their speech to the children's cognitive and linguistic level. In section 3.2, this dialogical perspective is compared to the hypothesis of a direct impact of the interlocutor's utterance, via repetitions or answers. We propose a developmental model where children first depend on adult scaffolding and then gradually become increasingly independent from this support in their use of referring expressions.

Before analyzing the relations between the adult's discourse and child's choice of a referring expression, we begin by showing that, as noted for other languages, young French-speaking children and their adult interlocutors use referring expressions in similar ways. As discussed in da Silva-Genest et al.

(Chapter 3, this volume), the crucial issue in French is the acquisition of clitic pronouns, in contrast to nouns and strong demonstrative pronouns like ça ('that', 'this'), which appear earlier. From a developmental point of view, the first uses of clitic pronouns are in continuity with the uses of omissions and fillers [START_REF] Veneziano | Early verb constructions in French: adjacency on the left edge[END_REF][START_REF] Veneziano | The changing status of 'filler syllabes' on the way to grammatical morphemes[END_REF]. From a cross-linguistic perspective, the use of clitic pronouns is similar to the use of other weak expressions in other languages, including verbal inflection in Spanish or Inuktitut, omission in Japanese, or full pronouns in English [START_REF] Allen | A discourse-pragmatic explanation for argument representation in child Inuktitut[END_REF][START_REF] Guerriero | The development of referential choice in English and Japanese: a discourse-pragmatic perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Hughes | The effect of individual discoursepragmatic features on referential choice in child English[END_REF][START_REF] Paradis | Subject realization and crosslinguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: What is the role of the input?[END_REF] 2 . From the onset, French-speaking children use third-person clitic pronouns, almost exclusively, to encode a previously mentioned referent, in contrast to nouns and demonstrative pronouns, which can appear in various contexts. In order to analyze this early specialization, we will first compare child and adult uses of third-person clitic pronouns to their uses of nouns and demonstrative pronouns.

Distribution and uses of referring expressions

The corpus3 consisted of dialogues between 24 children aged 1;10 to 2;6 (MLU between 1.3 and 3) and their more skillful interlocutors, usually the mothers or sometimes the fathers. In addition, the study occasionally included siblings, the observer, and other adults present in the verbal interactions, in order to respect the natural conditions of interaction. The dialogues included daily routines, and standardized or non-standardized free play at home and snack time.

2.1

The distribution of third-person pronouns, nouns, and demonstrative pronouns Table 1 presents the frequencies of third-person clitic pronouns, nouns, and strong demonstrative pronouns among all the referring expressions produced by the children and their interlocutors. The clitic demonstrative pronoun c' ('it') in the construction c'est ('it is'), dislocations, fillers and amalgams, null forms and all other pronouns (interrogative, indefinite, relative, and possessive) were grouped together under 'other forms'4 . A Wilcoxon test was run to compare children and their interlocutors. This suggests that they use these expressions according to the accessibility of the referent for the interlocutor. The aim of the present section is to compare the children's and their interlocutors' uses of referring expressions. Like da Silva-Genest et al., we classified the attentional and discursive status of referents into four mutually exclusive categories5 :

• New: the referent was totally new in the interaction.

• Activated: the referent was part of the ongoing activity or was inferable from the previous discourse but had not yet been mentioned.

• Discourse-given: the referent had already been mentioned by either the speaker or the interlocutor.

• Reintroduced: a thematic change took place between the targeted mention of the referent and the previous one.

The results are presented in Table 2. Distribution (in percentage) of referring expressions for each attentional and discursive status of the referents, for the children and their interlocutors.

We carried out binomial mixed-effect regressions fitted using the glmer function of lme4 R-package [START_REF] Bates | Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4[END_REF], in 6 Table 2 also shows the percentage of other referring expressions for each category. However, this grouping lumps together a set of expressions (dislocations, clitic demonstrative pronouns, and relative, indefinite, numeral, adverbial, possessive, and interrogative pronouns) that are heterogenous both in their formal and functional aspects. In all of the tables, their total percentage is noted only to show the relative importance of the three types of referring expressions under focus in this chapter.

order to assess the effect of the attentional and discursive status in the two groups (children and adult interlocutors). For each referring expression (as compared to all others), we assessed the effect of each type of context (as compared to all others). The regressions included two random-effect variables to control for the participant (the childrens' and their interlocutor's identity) and the session. The best fitting models are presented in Table 3. devices to the dialogical context, and/or to the attentional status of the referent.

Towards a dialogical account

How are these early pragmatic skills acquired? Currently there is no unified account of this process. Some studies have put forward the effects and interplay of factors such as linguistic structure, the child's cognitive development, or his/her linguistic experience (see [START_REF] Allen | The role of cognitive accessibility in children's referential choice[END_REF][START_REF] De Cat | Egocentric definiteness errors and perspective evaluation in preschool children[END_REF][START_REF] Gundel | Children's use of referring expressions in spontaneous discourse: Implications for theory of mind development[END_REF][START_REF] Hickmann | From early to late mastery of reference. Multifunctionality and linguistic diversity[END_REF]. Setting aside the impact of linguistic structure, which can only be assessed via cross-linguistic studies, one recurrent issue is whether such early pragmatic skills reflect a specific level of socio-cognitive development or are the outcome of linguistic experience.

According to Gundel and her co-workers [START_REF] Gundel | Children's use of referring expressions in spontaneous discourse: Implications for theory of mind development[END_REF][START_REF] Gundel | Children's use of referring expressions: some implications for theory of mind[END_REF], children are capable of making "reasonable assumptions about the addressee's memory and attention state [which] involves the attribution of mental states to others" (Gundel & Johnson, 2013: 53). This capacity is based on an implicit and relatively mechanical theory of mind, also qualified as "procedural". However, "procedural" knowledge implies communicative experiences with more competent partners.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the role of linguistic experience can be conceptualized in terms of the direct impact of adult utterances on the child's subsequent utterances, or in terms of referring patterns that children incorporate throughout early childhood. In this section, we address these two standpoints.

The immediate impact of the interlocutor's discourse

The immediate effects of the interlocutor's discourse can be observed both when children answer questions and when they immediately take up adult forms. The influence of questions on the choice of referring expressions has occasionally been analyzed for naturally occurring dialogues. This issue was first studied from the perspective of informativeness [START_REF] Allen | A discourse-pragmatic explanation for argument representation in child Inuktitut[END_REF][START_REF] Clancy | Preferred argument structure in Korean acquisition[END_REF]. Referents that were replies to questions (i.e. John as an answer to who came?) were considered informative because the identity of the referent was only partially established by the question. Therefore, children were likely to produce overt or strong expressions when answering questions. In later studies, Allen and her colleagues discarded this feature because it overrides the other accessibility factors (see Hughes & Allen, 2006) Several studies have shown that these features may interact with the prior mention and/or perceptual availability of the referent [START_REF] Campbell | Factors affecting young children's use of pronouns as referring expressions[END_REF]Wittek & Tomasello, 2005;[START_REF] Matthews | The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expressions[END_REF][START_REF] Salomo | Children's ability to answer different types of questions[END_REF]. Children as young as 2;6 appear to prefer null or weak forms when the question mentions the referent as the topic as compared to when it solicits utterances or arguments. [START_REF] Salomo | Children's ability to answer different types of questions[END_REF] showed that when the target referent was a patient (and not the topic), young children often fail to provide enough information when responding to predicate and general questions. They suggest that children may lack experience as to what is expected for answering these kinds of questions.

Children might also take up the referring expressions used by their adult interlocutor in immediately preceding utterances. Repetition is known to play an important role in the construction of common ground (E. [START_REF] Clark | Repetition as ratification: How parents and children place information in common ground[END_REF], and more specifically, as a first form of cohesion [START_REF] Halliday | Development of texture in child language[END_REF][START_REF] Salazar Orvig | La reprise aux sources de la construction discursive[END_REF]. A quite different view of repetition has been put forward in the account of mechanical alignment through priming [START_REF] Pickering | Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue[END_REF]. For [START_REF] Matthews | The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expressions[END_REF], this mechanism could account for the fact that 2-year-old children are sensitive to prior mentions of a referent but not, as 3-year-olds are, to perceptual availability. [START_REF] Clancy | Dialogic priming and the acquisition of argument marking in Korean[END_REF] ascribes to priming the acquisition of argument marking in Korean. However, although her results support her hypothesis, she insisted on the fact that other factors limit the action of priming, the most important of which "must be whether the reuse fits with the child's communicative goals" (Clancy, 2008: 115).

We explored the hypothesis that the adult's utterances have a direct impact on the child's subsequent use of referring expressions. We considered (a) the similarities in form and category between the expression used by the child and its immediate antecedent in the interlocutor's speech, and (b) the dialogical relations between utterances, in terms of contingency.

Data analysis

In this section, we present coding categories and statistical methods.

Form and category of antecedents

A child's use of a referring expression may be influenced by lexical choices and syntactic forms in the interlocutor's utterances. At a formal level, thirdperson clitic pronouns could be prompted more easily by the interlocutor's uses because alignment with the syntactic structure of the interlocutor's utterance for the child, would involve the same expression in the same syntactic function. For example, il ('he') as subject in the interlocutor's utterance would entail the use of il as the subject in the child's utterance. In order to assess this effect, we coded each referring expression used by the child according to the form and grammatical category of its antecedent in the interlocutor's discourse 8 . Two possibilities were considered for the correspondence with the antecedent's forms: same form and different form.

-Same form included both total correspondence between the child's and the interlocutor's forms (i.e. il for il, l(e) for l(e), etc.), and partial correspondence whenever the child took up part of a dislocation used by the interlocutor or vice versa, as in Example 1 below.

(1) Alice, 2;3, MLU 2.44 9

8 Data on the form and category of the interlocutor's antecedents were automatically retrieved in the coding file, so the inter-coder agreement rate was the same as for the list of referring expressions. If the expression had no antecedent in the interlocutor's discourse, we searched for a non-coreferential occurrence of the same form in the interlocutor's immediately preceding turns (up to 4 turns back). These cases were rare (3%).

-Different form included all expressions where the antecedent appeared in a different form from the expression used by the child (e.g. le after il, a third-person clitic pronoun after a noun, etc.).

We also looked for two options for grammatical categories, whatever the form: same category and different category.

--Same category included cases where the antecedent belonged to the same grammatical category as the child's expression (i.e. i for le, or elle for il, all of which are third-person clitic pronouns).

-Different category included cases where the antecedent belonged to a different grammatical category than the child's expression (e.g. a noun for a third-person clitic pronoun). Dislocations after single expressions or vice versa were considered different categories.

Braces indicate uncertain transcriptions or alternative interpretations. {X} stands for uninterpretable or inaudible segments. For more details on transcription conventions, see Appendix II.

Dialogical relations: coding

We also explored a second kind of relation to the interlocutor's discourse: the contingency context in dialogue. Five types of contexts were identified10 :

Repetition, Elicitation, Answer Continuity, Plain Continuity, and

Contrast. In the first three types the children's contributions were induced by their interlocutors' discourse.

-Repetition occurred in cases where the referent was mentioned in an utterance that partially or fully repeated the interlocutor's utterance (see Example (1) above.

-Elicitation occurred in cases where the referent was the focus of the adult's question, as in Example (2) below.

(2) Margaux, 2;3, MLU 2.62 -In Answer continuity, the referent was the topic of a question, as in Example (3) below:

(3) Maxime, 2;3, MLU 1;4

20

Statistics

We used mixed-effect binomial logistic regression fitted using the glmer function of lme4 R-package [START_REF] Bates | Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4[END_REF] in order to assess the effect of the following factors: the interlocutor's forms, the interlocutor's category, child's repetition, elicitation12 , and continuity (both answer continuity + plain continuity). In order to further assess these effects, binary partitioning trees were drawn with the ctree function included in the "party" R package [START_REF] Hothorn | partykit: A modular toolkit for recursive partitioning in[END_REF].

Results

In this section, we present the results for the impact of the interlocutor's antecedent on referring expressions use (Tables 4 and5) and dialogical relations (Table 7), and the interaction between the two (Figures 1 to 3). The best fitted models for these factors are presented in Table 6).

Form and category of the interlocutor's antecedents: results

Tables 4 and5 show that formal links, although very frequent, were not the most prevalent in the children's discourse. 5. Distribution (in percentage) of children's referring expressions for discourse-given referents, according to their correspondence category of interlocutor's antecedents These results can be seen as a glass that is either half full or half empty. As a whole, 40.8 % of the children's referring expressions corresponded partially or totally to the interlocutor's forms (Table 4), but neither the third-person clitic pronoun, nor the nouns or the strong demonstrative pronouns were significantly affected by the form of the antecedent (see Table 6). In contrast, children's third-person clitic pronouns and nouns were likely to be preceded by an antecedent of the same category in the interlocutor's discourse while strong demonstrative pronouns tended not to be preceded by a similar expression (Tables 5 and6). **The category in parentheses on fixed-effects rows indicates the category value compared with the intercept (reference level). For binomial factors, the reference level is the other factor. Table 6. Regression tables for third-person clitic pronouns, nouns, and strong demonstrative pronouns for discourse-given referring expressions in the children's discourse

Let us now turn to the use of these referring expressions in dialogue.

Dialogical relations: results

Table 7 presents the distribution of the children's referring expressions for given referents, according to the type of dialogical relations. We refer also to the models presented in Table 6, which include the assessment of the impact of dialogical relations on the use of these three types of referring expressions. Tables 6 and 7 paint a complex picture. Referring expressions were not evenly distributed across the dialogical contexts. Non-induced contributions (plain continuity and contrasted dialogical relations) were the most frequent (60%), whereas answers (17%) were the least frequent13 . Nearly 25% of the referring expressions appeared in a context of repetition. However, as shown in Table 24 6, this factor does not appear to affect the choice of any of these referring expressions.

Third-person clitic pronouns were never elicited by a question, whereas nouns were likely to appear as an answer. The picture was almost the opposite when the referent was the topic of a question. In this case, third-person clitic pronouns were frequent and nouns were clearly less frequent. Similarly, plain continuity in non-induced contributions promoted the use of third-person clitic pronouns but not of nouns or strong demonstrative pronouns. Moreover, the highest percentage of third-person clitic pronouns occurred for continuity, when considering together both plain continuity and answer-topic continuity.

To summarize, the use of third-person clitic pronouns, in contrast to that of nouns and strong demonstrative pronouns, was generally associated with continuity, and rarely occurred in constrained contexts such as questions or repetitions. pronoun and the presence of any other referring expressions (All Other). As we can see in Figure 1, the proportion of third-person clitic pronouns was always higher in the left nodes (nodes 4, 5, 7 and 8), which correspond to referents in continuity, than in the right nodes (10 and 11). This means that continuity was the factor accounting for most of the uses of third-person clitic pronouns by children. When the referent was in continuity, the category of the antecedent was the second most influential factor (node 2) but it did not necessarily entail the repetition of the form (e.g. le after 'il'). In Figure 3 we can see that continuity was the main factor, but in contrast to third-person clitic pronouns, it was a negative factor in the use of demonstrative pronouns.

Interaction between interlocutor's antecedents, and dialogical relations

The position of continuity as a secondary factor for nouns (Figure 2) or as an excluding factor for demonstrative pronouns (Figure 3), compared to its primary position for third-person clitic pronouns suggests that, for the latter, continuity is a crucial factor. Even though the children often used an expression of the same grammatical category, the frequent difference in form shows that the children's own wording prevailed over their interlocutor's. Let us remind that this predominance of continuity (as defined here) over more constraining contexts concerns specifically the choice of devices for referring to ad discourse-given referent. Therefore there is no contradiction with studies showing that questions (e.g. [START_REF] Salomo | Children's ability to answer different types of questions[END_REF] or repetitions (e.g. E. [START_REF] Clark | Repetition as ratification: How parents and children place information in common ground[END_REF]) support children's participation in dialogue, either by prompting or by ratifying their contributions.

These nuanced results argue against the priming hypothesis or other mechanistic analyses based on a synchronic approach to dialogue, which do not completely explain the children's uses of referring expressions. We therefore take up a second hypothesis.

Patterns in dialogue

Formats help children learn how to participate in dialogue, including how to answer questions. The interlocutor's linguistic forms also provide children with material for building their own utterances. Given that from the very beginnings of linguistic communication, "scaffolded" dialogues are present in adult-child interactions, two-year-olds have already been exposed to many uses of third-person clitic pronouns. They gradually become able to use these forms without adult support. [START_REF] Levy | Monologue as development of the text-forming function of language[END_REF] showed that in the well-known monologues of Emily [START_REF] Nelson | Narratives from the crib[END_REF], apparently anaphoric uses of pronouns reproduced the referential chains previously produced by the adult. In this context, the child probably learned "ways of doing" (procedural behaviors) before grasping the anaphoric value of pronouns. In the same vein, [START_REF] Levy | Words in discourse: a dialectical approach to the acquisition of meaning and use[END_REF] proposed a theory of word acquisition (more specifically, for causal and temporal words) wherein their use in activities and dialogues provides the basis for the acquisition of meaning.

Beyond the particular context analyzed by Nelson (monologues), the interactionist approach (Bruner, 1983a;Vygotsky, 1933Vygotsky, /1962) and the dialogical approach (Bakhtin, 1979(Bakhtin, /1986) seem particularly helpful in explaining the acquisition of pragmatic skills, because both embed the child's behavior in contextualized models of language use. An example of this perspective appears in [START_REF] Clancy | Referential strategies and the co-construction of argument structure in Korean acquisition[END_REF]. She proposes that children can abstract acceptable realizations of a predicate across argument structure alternations, "thanks to the juxtaposition of utterances with the same predicate in conversation" (Clancy, 1996, p. 35). The acquisition of argument structure is therefore a jointly achieved co-construction, interpretable, according to this author, in terms of Vygotky's theory of cognitive development. Clancy started from naturally occurring mother-child dialogues and extracted several series of utterances in which the mother included alternations between nominal or pronominal forms, and null forms, depending on discursive factors. The child is thus exposed both to a range of argument structure realizations and to the contextual factors responsible for their selection. This promotes the acquisition of appropriate uses of referring expressions.

We looked in our corpus for sequences that, even if they did not exhibit the strong regularities found in Clancy's data, might contain equivalent phenomena. If this is a possible route for acquisition, we should observe similar traces of the way children might lean on their experiences of alternations between nominal and pronominal forms. We used a qualitative method to examine the data in order to identify the various possible steps from simple repetition to more autonomous uses of referring expressions. The sequences we discuss are presented in three sets. The first set illustrates immediate or distant uptake of the structure produced by the interlocutor (Examples 6-7). The second illustrates the role of questions (Examples 8-10).

The third shows how non-induced, apparently autonomous contributions may in fact depend on utterances the interlocutor had produced in earlier sequences .

Immediate or distant uptake (6) Julien, 2;3, MLU 1.92 In Thi36, the child refers to the car with a one-word utterance. In Fat23, the father uses a third-person clitic pronoun to comment on the car's falling. The child (Thi37) relies on his father's wording and adds, in a dislocated position, the noun he had previously used. The father confirms with a single pronoun.

Several turns later and after focusing on other topics, the child again comments on his father's action by repeating an earlier utterance. In this context, we can observe both a first, scaffolded, use of a third-person clitic pronoun but in a dislocated structure, and then a not fully induced production, in a different context, still associated with the same referent.

Answering questions

When third-person clitic pronouns appear in the context of answering a question, they encode the topic common to the question and answer. One of the ways children might learn how to answer is by taking up the components of the question:

(8) Clément, 2;3, MLU 2.28 In his answer to this argument-focused question, the child takes up both the topic and the predicate, and simultaneously changes the role of the noun animal to fill the elicited slot, even though this does not fit his mother's expectations. This tight link between question and answer probably has its roots in early formats where children learn to answer specific questions [START_REF] Ninio | Pragmatic development[END_REF]. Example 9 presents two distant sequences of questionanswer sequences.

(9) Elodie, 2;3, MLU 2.04. In the first situation, the mother and child are playing at hiding their hands.

Gestures are associated with the question où elles sont? ('where are they '),

Mot71

) and the answer [pati] 'parties' ('gone', Elo56 Lol20 answers a predicate-focused question by using a previous contribution of her mother (Mot21, the noun travail, ('work') in the corresponding verb.

At the same time, she takes up the third-person clitic pronoun used by her mother in MoT21 and 22. The interlocutor's utterances appear to offer a resource for building the child's own utterances while being scaffolded by questions.

pronouns (i(l) / 'he'). In the meantime, the mother replied with a third-person clitic pronoun, thus providing the following pattern: "after a noun or dislocation follows a third-person clitic pronoun". Jul42 and 43, in Example 13, and Jul51 and 52 in Example 12 replicate this pattern, the first time scaffolded by the mother's confirmation and the second in a more independent way. These sequences clearly show how the association of different predicates and referring expressions, ordered according to a givenness hierarchy, can be gradually built upon throughout a dialogue.

Autonomous contributions are the outcome of long-term dialogical contributions where children take up the form, the content, and the sequentiality of adult contributions. Certainly, fuller support of our hypothesis will require more longitudinal follow-ups.

Conclusion

The present chapter explored some ways in which verbal interactions contribute to the emergence of an association between third-person clitic pronouns and the givenness of the corresponding referents, in contrast to referential uses of nouns and demonstrative pronouns.

The first step of our research was aimed at determining whether the uses of referential expressions in French-speaking children, as in other languages, are similar to those of adults. The results confirmed this similarity, and more specifically (also in line with the literature) that discourse-given referents are the most prevalent context for using third-person clitic pronouns. This step also provided groundwork for addressing our main question: How are the pragmatic skills for reference acquired? We hypothesized that they are the outcome of children's linguistic experiences with dialogue, which allow them to gradually achieve a non-induced and then wholly child-initiated use of referring expressions. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the relations between the children's utterances and their antecedents in the interlocutor's discourse, from three viewpoints: (1) the impact of the form of immediate antecedents, specifically through repetitions, or through the answer's structure, as framed by questions, (2) the various ways in which the child's utterances blend into the continuity of the dialogue, and (3) how children build upon their experiences with dialogical formats, either immediate or distant, and thereby gradually arrive at autonomous uses. We addressed the first and second issues quantitatively and the third, qualitatively.

Our previous research (Salazar [START_REF] Salazar Orvig | Dialogical factors in toddlers's use of clitic pronouns[END_REF] already brought forth arguments for the hypothesis that third-person clitic pronoun use is rooted in dialogue, since the results showed that third-person clitic pronouns appeared immediately after mentions of the referent by the interlocutor. The form of the interlocutor's referring expression proved not to have a significant influence, while its category did. Repetitions less frequently included pronouns than the other dialogical links. In other words, the child rarely "chose" a referring expression that reproduced the adult's. As for answers to questions, we noted that third-person clitic pronouns were never directly elicited by questions. At the second level, the analyses revealed that the use of third-person clitic pronouns mainly reflected dialogue continuity.

Does the absence of any significant effects of repetitions, questions, or form uptake occur uniformly throughout linguistic development?

In order to answer to this question, it would be necessary to analyze a corpus with a larger MLU span than the one we had here.

Our analysis of examples at the third level, that is, the ways in which the children's utterances leaned on dialogue, suggest that during a first stage, children's referring rely on immediate and then distant models; at the next stage, independent uses appear, albeit anchored in previous sequences; lastly, the production of third-person clitic pronouns becomes more often childinitiated. This kind of sequences can be explained by Bruner's concept of formats. One characteristic that Bruner assigned to formats is particularly relevant here: formats are modular, in the sense that they are amenable as subroutines for incorporation into larger-scale routines (Bruner, 1983b). In other words, they are not simple repetitions of sequences but may involve increased generalization and abstraction. The shift observed in our examples, Jamin, [START_REF] Rabain-Jamin | Implications of sibling caregiving for sibling relations and teaching interactions in two cultures[END_REF]. Whatever the culture, language is acquired in the framework of joint activities and conversations with more competent partners. Note also that in many Western countries children attend daycare centers or similar structures, which provide them with opportunities for polyadic verbal exchanges, and thereby contribute to their pragmatic development [START_REF] Marcos | Apprendre à parler: influence du mode de garde[END_REF]).

Wittgenstein's concept of "language games" encompasses a diversity of existing conditions. For Wittgenstein (1953) "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" ( §43), in the framework of language games, that is, "language and the actions into which it is woven" ( §7). This concept intends "to bring into prominence the fact that speaking a language is part of an activity" ( § 23). In her chapter on lexical acquisition, Nelson invokes this notion to explain how shared meaning can be attained and points out that "in the child's case, the problem [of meaning] is that of learning the criteria of parents' (and others') use of words in joint activity" (Nelson, 2007: 14).

This seems particularly relevant to findings on the way children begin to use referring expressions. They most certainly grasp forms and constructions from the recurrent uses of their interlocutors. Children may even grasp word functions before managing to produce adult-like forms, as suggested by the fact that uses of fillers and null forms resemble those of third-person clitic pronouns uses (see da Chapter 3,this volume). The first uses of pronouns may therefore be inserted in preexisting functions or already known language games. In sum, children acquire pragmatically meaningful ways of speaking rather than just syntactic or grammatical devices. The dialogical aspect of language games accounts for the fact that, before being able to build a model of his or her interlocutor's knowledge and needs, child's speech is scaffolded both by formats and by the meaning of the whole contextual activity.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Binary partition tree for third-person pronouns for discourse-given referents

Figure 2

 2 Figure2presents the binary partitioning tree for nouns. Nouns, for discourse-

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Binary partition tree for nouns for discourse-given referents

Table 2

 2

			. For the sake of clarity, we only show the
	detailed results for third-person clitic pronouns compared to nouns and strong
	demonstrative pronouns 6 .
		New	Activated	Discourse-	Reintroduced	Total
		%	%	Given	%	%
				%
	Chi*
	C3PP	0.9	3.4	13.6	3.4	9.4
	Nouns	60.1	31.2	34.4	47.2	38.1
	SDem	6.1	21.4	5.6	9.0	8.7
	Other RE	32.9	44.0	46.5	40.3	43.9
	Total N =	213	327	1225	233	1998
	Int
	C3PP	2.7	6.2	30.3	8.0	21.5
	Nouns	61.3	46.7	27.7	59.9	37.3
	SDem	2.8	9.4	4.5	2.9	4.9
	Other RE	33.2	37.7	37.5	29.2	36.3
	Total N=	705	743	3318	339	5105
	* Chi: children, Int: the children's interlocutors, C3PP: third-person clitic pronouns, SDem: strong demonstrative
	pronouns, Other RE: Other referring expressions (Fillers, Null forms, Clitic demonstrative pronouns, dislocations
	and other pronouns, such as relative, indefinite, possessive pronouns)

Table 3

 3

. Regression tables for third-person clitic pronouns, nouns, and strong demonstrative pronouns for all referring expressions used by the children and their interlocutors Discourse given was the most frequent context of occurrence for all types of referring expressions. Even though adults produced significantly more thirdperson clitic pronouns than children did, the children and their interlocutors exhibited similar trends: third-person clitic pronouns were more likely to encode discourse-given referents than other referents. Nouns were positively associated with new and reintroduced referents 7 and strong demonstrative pronouns were associated with activated ones. These findings indicate that these French-speaking children were able to link the available referring 7 Table

3

indicates a rather low C-value (0.66) for nouns.

[START_REF] Hosmer | Assessing the fit of the model[END_REF]

only C-values above .7 are reasonable. This suggests that other factors should be taken into account to accurately explain the choice of nouns.

  . In our work, we have shown that subject pronouns are seldom elicited by questions in French[START_REF] Salazar Orvig | Dialogical factors in toddlers's use of clitic pronouns[END_REF].

	However, these earlier studies focused only on referring expressions elicited
	by questions, without taking into account the fact that questions shape the
	wording of the answers. The focus of a question frames the form of a referring
	expression in several ways. A referent can be the topic of the question in

predicate-focused questions (e.g. what is the boy doing?). It can be elicited by argument-focused questions (e.g. who is coming? what do you want?). Or it can be indirectly brought up by general questions (e.g. what happened?).

  9 Example captions indicate the name of the child, his/her age (years; months) and the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) for the cited session. The first three letters of the child's first name are given in

	Mot70	il est où papa. (i)l est là-bas?	'where is daddy? is he there?'
	Ali26	[la]
		'là'	'there'
	Mot71	(i)l est dehors?	'is he outside?'
	Ali27	[le dəɔʁ papa]
		'(i)l est dehors papa'	'he is outside dad'

lowercase (e.g. Ali for Alice), Mot stands for mother and Fat for father. When the children's utterances are transcribed phonetically (between square brackets [ ]), the interpretation in French is given below in inverted commas. An approximate English translation is also given between inverted commas.

  The last two categories correspond to non-induced mentions of referents, i.e. not constrained by the interlocutor's utterance.

	-Plain continuity: the utterance added a new predicate to the given
	referent, without perspective or genre shifting, as in Arn35 Example
	(4) below:
	(4) Arnaud, 2;3, MLU 2.96
	Arn34	[wɛlɛklɛmari?]	'where is Claire-Marie?' ((the
		'où elle est Clai(re)-Marie?'	observer))
	Mot52	elle va revenir dans un petit	'she is coming back soon. finish
		moment. tu finis ta tarte aux	your apple pie'
		pommes
	Arn35	[lepati]
		'(e)lle est pa(r)tie'	'she is gone'
	or a contradiction as in Léa158 in Example (5):
	(5) Léa, 2;2, MLU 2.4
	Mot179	et le prince il est beau le prince?	'and the prince is he handsome the
			prince?'
	Léa157	[wi]
		'oui'	'yes'
	Mot180	c'est vrai?	'really?'
	Léa158	[əpɛ ̃ ijepaʒãti ləpɛ s dəpuselina] 'F 11 p(r)in(ce) il est pas gentil le	'F prince he is not nice
	Mot8	qu'est-ce qu'il fait ça p(r)ince de Poucelina'	'what is he doing, that' Thumbelina's prince'
	Max6	[idɔʁ]
		'i(l) dort'	'he is sleeping'

-Contrast: the utterances introduced a contrast in the dialogue, including a change in topical status, a perspective shift, an opposition,

Table 4 .

 4 Distribution (in percentage) of children's referring expressions for discourse-given referents, according to their correspondence with the form used by their interlocutors

		Same		Different
		Form		Form
		Total	Partial	Total
		Correspondence	Correspondence
		%	%	%	%	N=
	C3PP*	26.5	18.1	44.6	55.4	166
	Nouns	42.6	6.5	49.2	50.8	413
	SDem	18.5	12.3	30.8	69.2	65
	All RE	28.2	12.5	40.8	59.1	1211
	*C3PP: third-person pronouns, SDem: strong demonstrative pronouns, RE: referring expressions
		Same category	Different category
		%	%	N=
	C3PP*	45.8	54.2	166
	Nouns	49.9	50.1	413
	SDem	20.0	80.0	65
	All RE	34.0	66.0	1211
	* C3PP: third-person clitic pronouns, SDem: strong demonstrative pronouns, RE: referring expressions
	Table

Table 7 .

 7 Distribution (in percentages) of the children's referring expressions for given referents, according to the type of dialogical relations.

  ). During this game, the mother uses dislocations or third-person clitic pronouns and the child uses null forms. During the following play session, the mother again asks the same type of question, il est où? ('where is it?') about a new referent. The child relies on the same kind of answer [i pati] with the same predicate used in the previous game and the pronoun her mother just used in her question. This type of routine is probably the basis of more general question-answer relations, as in Example 3. Predicate-focused questions provide a frame where children can specify a new predicate while maintaining continuity of topic.

	This is the case in Example 3 where Maxime takes up the third-person clitic
	pronoun and substitutes the pro-verb 'fait' ('doing') of his mother's question
	by a specific verb 'dort' ('sleeping'). This is why answers appear to be good
	candidates for first uses of pronouns: children are scaffolded both by the
	illocutionary force and the form of questions. This gives children the
	opportunity to participate in the dialogue by reusing the interlocutor's
	wording to build a new utterance. This double process is clearly visible in
	Example 10.
	(10) Loli, 2;3, MLU 2.94
	Lol18	[mamã lɛu papa]
		'maman (i)l est où papa?'	'mommy. where is daddy?'
	Mot21	t(u) as d(é)jà demandé. il est à son	'you already asked. he is at work'
		tra(vail) /..?
	Lol19	[sõ byʁo]
		'son bureau'	'his office'
	Mot22	il est à son bureau oui. c'est quoi le	'he is at his office, yes. what is the
		bureau? qu'est-ce qu'i(l) fait au	office? what does he do at the
		bureau?	office?'
	Lol20	[il kʁava]
		'il trava(ille) !'	'he works!'

This chapter deals only with reference to entities. For a discussion on the influence of child-directed speech on the way children refer to participants, seeCaët,

There is considerable debate among Romanists about the status of subject clitic pronouns[START_REF] Culbertson | Qu'en est-il des clitiques sujet en français oral contemporain? Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française -CMLF[END_REF]; for a discussion see De[START_REF] De Cat | French subject clitics are not agreement markers[END_REF]. Whether subject clitic pronouns are seen as full pronouns or as morphological inflections is not relevant to our purpose here.

The corpus of 24 dyads was drawn from the Paris Corpus, the Standardized Play Corpus, the Childcare corpus, the Nashawati corpus and the Salazar Orvig corpus. See Appendix I for further details.

An inter-coder agreement test was conducted on the total DIAREF Paris corpus. Excerpts of 10% of referring expressions for each session were coded by a different member of the team. For categories of referring expressions the inter-coder agreement score was 95.81 and Cohen's kappa was 0.95

The inter-coder agreement rate was of 86.97%, and Cohen Kappa was 0.796.

The inter-coder agreement rate for dialogical relations was 87.24%, and Cohen's kappa was 0.843.

In the interpretations and translations of children's utterances, 'F' stands for a filler syllable.

Elicitation was not assessed for third-person clitic pronouns because no pronoun was elicited by a question.

In our corpus, most questions were yes/no questions.

The form[ɛn] in this utterance was considered as a pronoun and not as a filler because it is a phonological approximation of the adult target[ɛl]

This gender error (il for elle) does not show up in the English translation

In the Childcare corpus (see also Example 3) we purposely had the observer leave the room after starting up the camera. This protocol elicited numerous questions from the children about the "lady" and her disappearance.

In this example, [e] before [kakɔ͂ ](for 'balcon', 'balcony') is interpreted as a filler (F), for which we cannot determine whether it corresponds to the verb 'est' ('is'), an amalgam of the verb and its subject or even a pre-nominal filler.

Acknowledgements

We thank the internal and external anonymous reviewers, as well as Evan Kidd, for their helpful comments, the team of the DIAREF project (Acquisition des Expressions Référentielles en dialogue: approche multidimensionnelle) for their contribution to the scientific and methodological discussions. The data analyses reported here were conducted by the authors with the collaboration of Janina Klein, Marine Le Mené and Salma Nashawati. We thank Stefano Rezzonico for his invaluable advices for the statistical analysis. A special thank goes to Vivian Waltz for her thorough and rigorous English proof-reading.

Funding

This research was made possible thanks to the grant from the ANR Agence Nationale de la Recherche (French National Agency for Research: Grant n° ANR-09-ENFT-055).

Autonomous uses are anchored in previous sequences

In the least induced form of continuity, we observed children's production of third-person clitic pronouns with no influence from the interlocutors' earlier utterances.

( In this example, the child initiates a new predication about the referent and uses a third-person clitic pronoun after her mother uses a noun. Because this sequence occurred at the beginning of a session, the child's use of a thirdperson clitic pronoun may be considered as not induced. At the same time, this use is probably connected to previous conversational experiences and could be the result of the accumulation of a series of past co-constructed experiences. Examples 12 and 13 illustrate, in one particular dialogue, how these processes may evolve on a larger scale.

(12) Julien, 2;3, MLU 1.92 [kekuku] and in Example 12 [lepatiemene]). Therefore, the apparently monological construction in Example 12 appears to be the result of the internalization of the predicates the child has just heard during the conversation. A similar pattern can be observed for referring expressions. The child introduced the referent only with a noun dame ('lady') and the mother replied with a dislocation, la dame elle ('the lady she'), thus offering the child a pronoun associated with the noun. The following contributions from the child consist of several attempts at producing a dislocation, first with only the noun postposed to the verb (Jul5) and then with approximating masculine from more scaffolded to more autonomous uses of third-person clitic pronouns, appears to reflect this evolution of formats. As proposed by [START_REF] Nelson | Young minds in social worlds: Experience, meaning, and memory[END_REF], dialogues provide children with a structure for building their own understanding of a task or concept.

This leads us to rethink the role of child-directed speech and input, at least in regard to referring expressions. As H. [START_REF] Clark | How to talk with children[END_REF] put it, the central matter is not "talking-to" children (which would correspond to the traditional conception of input) but "talking-with" children, i.e., engaging them in interactive conversation. "They [adult and child] try to establish, as they go along, that they and their partner have understood what each other meant well enough for current purposes" (H. Clark, 2014: 334). It remains, however, that in adult-child conversation one of the participants is still a beginner conversationalist. Some form of "scaffolding" is still necessary.

Any analyses of the role of dialogue in language acquisition, and particularly, in the present case, in the use of referring expressions, would be incomplete if it does not take into account the fact that individualized, sustained, adultchild dialogue is not present in all cultures. As cross-cultural research has shown, children may be immersed from birth in the daily life of an extended social group rather than in a nuclear family. Moreover, in some cultures very little talk is addressed to children before they produce one-or two-word utterances. Despite these characteristics, children are not devoid of support for language acquisition [START_REF] Brown | Conversational structure and language acquisition: The role of repetition in Tzeltal[END_REF][START_REF] Ochs | The impact of language socialization on grammatical development[END_REF]Rabain-Wittek, A., & Tomasello, M. (2005). Young children's sensitivity to listener knowledge and perceptual context in choosing referring expressions.

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