The Acquisition of Referring Expressions

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 interacti