90

This article presents the results of a study on the emergence of anaphora in children’s speech. Concentrating on a dialogical perspective we show that the anaphoric value of children’s first pronouns emerges earlier than is usually claimed in the literature. Previous research on language development comes to the conclusion that cohesion is precocious, but that intradiscursive relations are mastered quite late. Our quantitative results (drawn from the analysis of one hundred and five sequences of adult-child conversations) show that 90% of children’s pronouns are used for second mentions of discourse objects. Pronouns appear in contexts of high discursive continuity and shared attention. These linguistic units are therefore specialized very early. Our conclusion is that children do not start with a deictic use of pronouns and use them anaphorically later on. Moreover, first anaphoric devices are based in dialogue. The unity of the text could therefore spring from the unity of the dialogical exchange.