Dialogical beginnings of anaphora: The use of third person pronouns before the age of 3

Abstract This paper deals with the referential value of third person pronouns used by French-speaking children (aged 1;10 to 3) in a corpus of natural dialogues, in different communicative situations (dyadic and polyadic; at home and in nursery school). The referential value of pronouns is assessed on a discursive and dialogical basis by studying the givenness and newness of referents in the children's utterances and the links with the interlocutor's discourse. The results show that, from the onset, pronouns mostly refer to objects that are already in the interlocutors’ focus of attention and that have been previously mentioned in the dialogue. Moreover, pronouns most often refer to a discourse object previously mentioned by the child's interlocutor. This suggests that the anaphoric value of pronouns is first acquired through dialogue before it is extended to monological uses.