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Editorial

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragmaJournal of Pragmatics 56 (2013) 1--4

Introduction

This special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics is devoted to the relationships between grammar and pragmatics in thefield of language acquisition, as approached from different angles and theoretical backgrounds. This is a challenging topicin the field of child language because it brings into question our conceptions of language and language use.

This topic can be broken down into at least three levels. At the most fundamental level, it concerns a continuum ofconceptions of the way in which pragmatics interacts with other aspects of language, ranging from formalist approaches---where pragmatics is seen as a nonlinguistic, cognitive module---to functionalist models of syntax, which highlight theintertwined nature of grammatical and pragmatic-discursive factors and consider communication to be the foundation oflinguistic systems. At the formalist end of the continuum, nativist approaches rule out any role of pragmatics in languageacquisition; at the functionalist end, sociopragmatic or interactionist approaches consider the acquisition of pragmaticmeanings to be the first step in language development.

At the second level, it raises the question of the role of pragmatic factors in the acquisition of linguistic units andstructures. From the nativist point of view, pragmatic competence develops as an independent dimension of cognition andhas no effect on linguistic development. In the sociopragmatic view, linguistic acquisition is a by-product of interaction(Tomasello, 1999, 2003), and language acquisition should be seen not as a series of independent, consecutive processesbut as a global phenomenon where various emergent skills act in a mutually interdependent way (Bruner, 1983; Nelson,2007).

This brings us to the third level: How are pragmatics and linguistics intertwined at the most detailed level, that oflinguistic units and structures and their use? Note that the differing conceptions found at the first and second levels are notnecessarily reflected at the third level. For most traditional studies, the structural dimension (grammatical and syntacticparadigms) and the functional dimension (related to discourse, pragmatics, and dialog) are disconnected. Morespecifically, the grammatical system seems to emerge as an autonomous system without connection to how it is used,and thus to its role in communication. Pragmatic development, on the other hand, seems to belong to the cognitive,psychological, or sociological sphere. Even among pragmatically oriented studies, there is a broad range of approaches,going from those that also consider pragmatic competence essentially from the angle of social development, to those thatsee linguistic units and structures as being rooted in pragmatic meanings.

The disconnection between structural and pragmatic aspects can be considered inconsequential when what is at stakeis the development of a competence that is specifically discursive or social, or on the contrary not very context-dependent,like phonology. The disconnection is certainly a more critical issue when context-dependent domains that implypragmatic-discursive factors (e.g., indexicality) are at stake. This leads to a paradox: some studies that take a functionaliststance consider that the grammatical aspects of pronouns or determiners are acquired before their referential values(Karmiloff-Smith, 1979, 1985; Hickmann, 2003), while for some generativist studies, the problem is not the referentialvalue per se but rather children’s lack of an ability to assess the addressee’s cognitive state, or their lack of a pragmaticconcept that regulates usage or performance (Schaeffer et al., 2003; Schaeffer and Matthewson, 2005).

Recent studies on referring expressions (Allen, 2000; Allen and Schöder, 2003; De Cat, 2004; Serratice, 2005;Skarabela, 2006; Gundel et al., 2007; Salazar Orvig et al., 2010) have shed light on the interdependence of these twodimensions, showing that young children not only use these expressions adequately but also rely on linguistic devices asa resource for social interaction. Consequently, studies that take both perspectives are now challenging the traditionalbreakdown, making it necessary to promote dialog across theoretical frameworks in order to rethink the complementarityof grammar and pragmatics (Allen, 2006).

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In the present special issue, the contributions address this set of questions from various theoretical approaches,whether generativist, functionalist, or interactionist. In this sense, the issue as a whole covers various debates takingplace in the field of language acquisition, i.e., the debate about the place and role of cognitive processes and/orpragmatics and interaction in the course of acquisition; the debate about the interfaces between the pragmatic, cognitive,syntactic, and semantic facets; the debate about the respective weights of formal, semantic, and pragmatic factors; thedebate about whether and how the meaning of linguistic units evolves throughout language development, and so on.

The papers concern various languages (English, French, and Inuktitut) and encompass quite a large range of aspectsof child language. Since referring expressions are at the crossroads of grammar and pragmatics they are a prevailingtopic, and several articles deal with them. However, reference is not the only area in which the interaction of structure anduse is a relevant issue. This question also applies more generally to the acquisition of other categories (such asadjectives) and the first syntactic structures and to the role of dialog in the development of the different language levels aswell.

Regarding referring expressions, several papers examine the question of children’s choice of a noun, a pronoun, oromission, and/or the problem of the unfolding of the determiner and pronoun paradigms. There is at least one commongeneral conclusion for these studies: pragmatic meanings do not appear later than grammatical meanings. The resultsalso show that by an early age, children are sensitive to the intralinguistic or extralinguistic context. However, the authorsdiffer in the theoretical frameworks they use to explain this adaptation: some put forward cognitive mechanisms whileothers stress the role of interactive processes. The cognitive mechanisms in question can concern either the processing ofreferents in a specific context or the child’s capacity to align his/her state of knowledge with that of the addressee (whichcan be seen as a social-cognitive process).

The papers by Skarabela, Allen & Scott-Philips, Serratrice, and Hughes & Allen share the question of the impact offactors related to the accessibility of referents (presence, joint attention, and previous mention) or their nature (animacy,gender) on the choice of referring expressions (nouns, pronouns, or omitted forms). Skarabela, Allen, & Scott-Philipsstudy the referential forms used by 2- and 3-year-old Inuktitut children to introduce new referents in spontaneous familyconversations. The paper focuses on the role of joint attention in the choice of referring expressions in a language(Inuktitut) that authorizes argument omission. The results show that joint attention affects all language aspectsconsidered, which, according to the authors, supports the idea that young children are able to recognize joint attention andto grasp which aspects of discourse are readily accessible to the interlocutor.

Hughes & Allen also study how the choice of a referring expression is influenced by several accessibility features inEnglish-speaking children (a language that does not authorize omissions). The contextual components that exhibit thestrongest influence are prior mention, physical presence, and joint attention. For more accessible referents children tendto omit the referring expression, but they use the most explicit form (nouns) for less accessible ones. This sensitivity to therelationship between accessibility features and referential form increases with linguistic development, as childrengradually begin to prefer pronouns to null forms, and to more clearly contrast demonstratives and lexical forms.

Serratrice presents an experimental study on story-telling by English-speaking 4-year olds that explores the wayfeatures like animacy and perceptual information determine the choice of expressions (and more specifically pronouns)for referring to characters in a picture story. Two main factors are considered for target-referent encoding: whether thepreviously mentioned character is alone in the picture or with another character, and whether one or both characters areanimated. The results show that the use of pronouns for the target referent is affected by the perceptual availability andanimacy of potential ‘‘competitors’’. More generally, this study sheds light on the factors affecting children’sconceptualization of referents and their representation of the shared discourse model.

Gundel & Johnson approach the question of reciprocal implications between children’s theory of mind (ToM) and theirability to use various referring expressions, including personal and demonstrative pronouns and definite vs. indefinitearticles. The expressions were taken from corpora of children under 3 years of age during spontaneous conversations.The authors categorize the referents according to criteria found in their ‘‘givenness hierarchy’’ model. In this model, areferent’s status is an (assumed) mental state, not a linguistic entity. The highest degree in this hierarchy corresponds toreferents that are ‘‘in focus’’; the lowest, to referents that are ‘‘identifiable by type’’. The results show that the degree ofgivenness affects the proportion of pronouns as well as the types of pronouns and determiners used. According to theauthors, these results argue for the existence of two stages in ‘‘mind-reading abilities’’: the first is implicit andnonrepresentational; the second is representational and more conscious. The pragmatic abilities of children under 3would involve only the first ToM stage.

Theory of mind appears to be the starting point for De Cat’s research. Her study concerns the choice between definiteand indefinite determiners to encode new referents. Data are collected from children ages 3--5 years, in an experimentalstory-telling situation. The study focuses on ‘‘egocentric errors’’---here, the use of definite determiners for referents that arenew to the addressee---and explores the hypothesis of a correlation with the child’s ToM. For all three age groups, eventhough newness was shown to influence referential-expression choice, a certain number of egocentric errors were found.However, the hypothesized correlation between performance and ToM was not confirmed. For this reason, De Cat turns to

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Pickering and Garrod’s model (Pickering and Garrod, 2004), according to which alignment between participants in adialog does not require the explicit computation of the interlocutor’s mental state but derives from the automatic andgradual formation of a common ground.

Sociocognitive factors are also examined in the paper by de Weck & Jullien, who study the impact of shared knowledgeon the way children encode the first mention of a referent. The authors compare 6- to 11-year-old children with typicaldevelopment (TD) and children with an SLI in a story-telling situation based on pictures. The descriptors considered arethe different types of referring expressions (pronouns, nouns, definite and indefinite articles, omissions, as well assyntactic constructions like clefts and dislocations). The influence of shared knowledge is tested by comparing twonarratives elicited from the same pictures, one addressed to the experimenter and the other to another adult who isalleged to not know the story. The results reveal a complex pattern of similarities and differences between the two groupsof children, with the differences being more pronounced for the younger children. Children with SLI used a higherproportion of definite determiners in an inappropriate context (i.e., with the ‘‘naive’’ adult), and also more left dislocationsthan TD children did, in both situations. The discussion addresses the debate about the ‘‘specifically linguistic’’ orpragmatic origins of language deficits, and proposes instead that linguistic units contain both structural and pragmaticcomponents which, like two faces of a coin, cannot be separated.

The research presented by Salazar Orvig, Marcos, Caët, Corlateanu, da Silva, Hassan, Heurdier, Le Mené, Leber-Marin & Morgenstern takes a dialogical stance for understanding pragmatic competence, and more specifically, earlyuses of determiners. The study with 24 children ages 1.10--3 was conducted on a corpus of naturally occurring dialogs inthree settings: at home, at a daycare center, and at a nursery school. The idea was to examine the respective weights ofdistributional and discursive-pragmatic factors in the choice of determiners. Seeking to explain why the definite--indefinitecontrast does not necessary unfold in discourse, determiner use is studied from complementary perspectives: the rate ofoverlap contrasted determiners for the same noun, and their referential and nonreferential uses in dialog. The study showsthat determiner choice is strongly influenced by contextual factors potentially related to discursive organization, such asNP position in the referential chain, and dialog dynamics.

Language use is also at the core of the study by Kilani & Xanthos on the acquisition of adjectives in French. Theiranalysis focuses on the adjective petit (little), known to be the preferred and most productive adjective for French-speaking children. The study is based on a longitudinal corpus obtained in everyday situations from two children betweenthe ages of 1.6 and 2.11. The authors noted that this adjective was predominant both in the child’s language and in theadult’s input. They describe the order of appearance of the functions (attributive, predicative) of petit, as well as its values(mostly affective and mitigating, i.e., pragmatic, at the ages considered here), in such a way that these functions precedesemantic meanings. In early acquisition, according to Kilani & Xanthos, an NP with petit is the basis from which the childbuilds structures, gradually displaying the whole range of uses, from frozen expressions to completely productive ones.The acquisition of petit illustrates a constructivist approach where children build linguistic values from input provided bothby caretakers and by their current developmental level.

The constructivist approach is the basic framework of the paper by Veneziano, who addresses a central and largelydebated aspect of grammatical and syntactic development: the transition from one-word to multi-word utterances. Theauthor proposes a ‘‘cognitive-pragmatic’’ model according to which passing from single-word to multi-word speechrequires a conceptual change in the way children grasp the relationship between communicative intentions and theirown verbal expression. Two phenomena lay the groundwork for the initial steps in the move up to multi-word speech:(1) ‘‘expressive options’’, which correspond to the child’s possibility of assessing one and the same communicativeintention from different perspectives, and (2) the production (before the emergence of multi-word utterances) ofsuccessive single-word utterances (SSWUs), which are generated within and through conversations with adults. Thearticulation of a child’s utterance with an adult’s utterances precedes the ‘‘autonomous’’ articulation of the child’sdiscourse.

Morgenstern, Leroy, & Caët also look at the role of dialog in language development and in how children make useof adult contributions to ‘‘help themselves’’ during the process of language acquisition. The study revolves around therole and dynamics of repairs. The authors explore both other-repairs---repairs by the mother of the child’s errors at thephonological, morphological, syntactic, or pragmatic level---and self-repairs by the child, which can be spontaneousor elicited by the mother. A follow-up of three children from ages 1;6 to 2;11 is reported. The results indicate anoverall decrease in other-repairs and a relative increase in self-repairs. The decline in the number of repairs wasparticularly clear-cut for phonology. The authors conclude that, in and through dialog, children internalize the adult’srole while appropriating linguistic tools, social codes, and behaviors intertwined with language. The process ofbuilding these grammatical tools and constructions takes place through collaboration between adults and children.

At the end of this overview, one question arises: How do acquisitional data challenge general pragmatics? Thisquestion seems to go beyond the general debate about the relationship between the linguistic and cognitive aspects oflanguage, by raising the issue of how adult meanings and uses (usually seen as forming a stabilized system) areprogressively constructed by children during language acquisition. Theoretical cleavages are still leading to opposing

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views, with on one side, approaches that look at a pre-constructed system in the face of external factors, and on the other,approaches that explore the way in which layers of meaning filter down through communicative experience.

We hope that the contributions to this special issue will pave the way to further discussions on reference, referringexpressions, grammar and syntactic structures, and the role of communicative experience in the construction oflanguage.

References

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null arguments. In: Slabakova, R., Montrul, S.A., Prévost, P. (Eds.), Inquiries in Linguistic Development: in Honor of Lydia White. JohnBenjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 233--255.

Allen, Shanley E.M., Schöder, Heike, 2003. Preferred argument structure in early Inuktitut spontaneous speech data. In: Du Bois, J.W., Kumpf, L.E., Ashby, W.J. (Eds.), Preferred Argument Structure. Gramar as Architecture for Function. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 301--338.

Bruner, Jerome Seymour, 1983. Child’s Talk; Learning to use Language. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.De Cat, Cécile, 2004. Early ‘‘pragmatic’’ competence and the null subject phenomenon. In: Bok-Bennema, R., Hollebrandse, B., Kampers-Manhe,

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Gundel, Jeanette K., Ntelitheos, Dimitris, Kowalsky, Melinda, 2007. Children’s use of referring expressions: Some implications for theory of mind.ZAS Papers in Linguistics.

Hickmann, Maya, 2003. Children’s Discourse: Person, Time and Space Accross Languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Karmiloff-Smith, Annette, 1979. A Functional Approach to Child Language: A Study of Determiners and Reference. Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge.Karmiloff-Smith, Annette, 1985. Language and cognitive processes from a developmental perspective. Language and Cognitive Processes 1, 61--

85.Nelson, Katherine, 2007. Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.Pickering, Martin, Garrod, Simon, 2004. Toward a Mechanistic Psychology of Dialogue. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 27, 169--190.Salazar Orvig, Anne, Marcos, Haydée, Morgenstern, Aliyah, Hassan, Rouba, Leber-Marin, Jocelyne, Parès, Jacques, 2010. Dialogical

beginnings of anaphora: The use of third person pronouns before the age of 3. Journal of Pragmatics 42, 1842--1865.Schaeffer, Jeannette, Matthewson, Lisa, 2005. Grammar and pragmatics in the acquisition of article systems. Natural Language & Linguistic

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Falk, Y. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 19th Israel Association of Theoretical Linguistics. Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva.Serratice, Ludovica, 2005. The role of discourse pragmatics in the acquisition of subjects in Italian. Applied Psycholinguistics 26, 437--462.Skarabela, Barbora, 2006. Signs of early social cognition in children’s syntax: the case of joint attention in argument realization in child Inuktitut.

Lingua 117, 1837--1857.Tomasello, Michael, 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA/London.Tomasello, Michael, 2003. Constructing a Language. A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge,

MA/London.

Anne Salazar Orvig*Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -- Paris 3, RFC -- EA 1483, Clesthia, France

Haydée MarcosCNRS, LACO -- Université de Poitiers, France

*Corresponding author at: Institut de Linguistique et Phonétique Générale et Appliquée,Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -- Paris 3, 19 rue des Bernardins, 75005 Paris, France.

Tel.: +33 0144320570/0585; fax: +33 0144320573E-mail address: anne.salazar-orvig@univ-paris3.fr

7 July 2013