Introduction

This chapter introduces the concept of reference, the process by which linguistic expressions apply to/pick out entities (in the world/the mind), roughly speaking their meaning or intended interpretation. It provides an overview of approaches to reference in the linguistic and philosophical literature. It then outlines the structure and content of the two parts of the volume: I. Foundations and II. Applications and Implications. Part I covers foundational topics such as different types of referring expression and their interpretation, and Part II covers the acquisition and processing of reference from the perspectives of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics, including robotics.

The Indefiniteness of Definiteness

This paper is about definiteness, and more specifically about the difficulties involved in getting clear on which noun phrases should be classified as definite, or more properly, which have uses which can be so classified. A number of possibilities are considered. First we consider some traditional proposals—those analyzing definiteness in terms of strength, uniqueness, or familiarity. Following that, three more recent proposals are presented, which have been put forward in the wake of Montague’s analysis of NPs as generalized quantifiers—those proposed by Jon Barwise and Robin Cooper (1981), Barbara Partee (1986), and Sebastian Löbner (2000). The tentative conclusion is that Russell’s uniqueness characteristic (suitably modified) holds up well against the others.

Joint Reference

This chapter argues that referring is a joint accomplishment of the interlocutors involved in a conversation. This argument is built around two assumptions. Firstly, it is not words that refer but people who refer by using words in appropriate contexts. Referring is a kind of purposive linguistic action. Secondly, it is possible to perform a purposive action jointly. Two or more agents in coordination can do their part to bring about a joint accomplishment that would not be brought about by any of the individuals acting alone. There are cases of joint referring, where two or more interlocutors do their part to produce an outcome (referring) that would not result from the efforts of any of the individuals acting alone. Furthermore, all referring is a joint accomplishment and talk of individuals as referring (either in conversation or in thought) is parasitic on the idea of joint referring.

Referential Intentions

This chapter presents a critical review of research on referential intentions, in the fields of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology, focusing both on what makes them referential and how they function as intentions. This project is distinctively philosophical—the concept referential intention combines elements of language with those of action, and a full account of it should blend theoretical work on reference in linguistics and the philosophy of language with theoretical work on intention in psychology and the philosophy of action. While such an account is beyond the scope of this chapter, the aim is to make progress toward it by outlining ways in which referential intentions are conceptually constrained by reference on the one side and intention on the other. The goal is to supply an overview of these states that does justice to their variety while introducing constraints on their implementation in semantic and pragmatic theories of natural language.

A Taxonomy of Uses of Demonstratives

This chapter presents a preliminary taxonomy of the various ways in which demonstrative noun phrases are used, with particular focus on examples from English. The classification of demonstrative uses begins with a consideration of the semantic value of the demonstrative NP—whether the speaker is using the demonstrative to denote or refer to an entity, a kind, a predicate, or a variable in a quantificational domain—and then further categorizes the uses of demonstratives on the basis of various pragmatic considerations that influence their interpretation. The taxonomy includes many uses previously identified in the literature as well as other uses that have not heretofore been discussed.

Different Senses of ‘Referential’

There exist a range of different notions of referentiality in the literature. The cognitive status ‘referential’ on the Givenness Hierarchy means that the hearer can assign a unique representation to the speaker’s intended referent by the time the sentence is processed. This is distinct from definite referents, which are expected to be ‘uniquely identifiable’, a status that entails ‘referential’, on the basis of the definite noun phrase alone. In this chapter, it is argued that phrases that are ‘attributive’, as distinct from ‘referential’, in Donnellan’s 1966 sense are ‘referential’ in the Givenness Hierarchy sense, and are marked as such in languages that mark referentiality overtly via determiners or case marking. Furthermore, it is suggested that bare nominal phrases in languages that allow them are unspecified for referentiality, but that an implicature of non-referentiality for a bare nominal may be generated in languages that mark definiteness or referentiality morphologically.

Reference Resolution

This chapter reviews psycholinguistic research on reference resolution. Firstly, it discusses experiments on the interpretation of overt pronouns indicating that topicality-related properties of potential antecedents—such as subjecthood, givenness, and pronominalization—guide pronoun interpretation. Perhaps surprisingly, other studies show that focus-related factors are also at play. Experimental data is then reviewed from languages with both null and overt pronouns (e.g., Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Korean). Many experiments on reference views pronoun resolution as a search process, in contrast to an alternative account which regards it as by-product of general inferencing/reasoning about the semantic coherence relations between clauses. Recent work has explored possible ways of reconciling these views, and has also started to investigate the mental representation of coherence relations and the relation to perspective-taking. The final part of the chapter, reviews consequences of humans’ processing limitations on pronoun production and interpretation, including cataphora and the possibility of shallow processing.

Contextual Influences on Reference

This chapter considers a number of ways in which the understood reference of a definite noun phrase—definite description, pronoun, demonstrative, indexical, or proper name—may depend on the context in which it is uttered. Contextual influences are reflected in phenomena such as anaphora and familiarity presuppositions, descriptive incompleteness, domain restriction, dependence on a shifted perspective in intensional contexts resulting in de re, de dicto, and de se interpretations, and inclusion of context-sensitive predicates. Careful investigation of particular types of context dependence has played an important role in the evolution of semantic theories of these NP types over the past fifty years. But outstanding puzzles about how context influences reference pose challenges to the most influential current semantic theories of some NP types, including direct reference theories of indexicals and demonstratives, and rigid designator accounts of proper names.

Accessibility and Reference Production

This chapter reviews recent research on speakers’ referential choices in discourse. It focuses on the choice to mention a certain referent first on the one hand, and to produce a pronoun or more elaborate noun phrase on the other. Whereas traditional theories have relied mainly on influence of linguistic context to explain these choices, recent psycholinguistic studies have started investigating the effect of non-linguistic factors as well. Results of these studies suggest that the two referential choices (choice of referent and choice of referring expression) are largely driven by different sets of factors, contrary to the claim that both are related to accessibility of mental representations in memory. The chapter concludes that these findings are best explained by assuming referents can be accessible on different levels: a local and a more global discourse level. Referential choices may be influenced by both levels of accessibility, but with different probabilities for different choices.

Indefiniteness and Specificity

The semantic–pragmatic category ‘specificity’ is used to describe various semantic and pragmatic contrasts of indefinite noun phrases. This chapter will first provide a brief illustration of different linguistic means to express these contrasts in different languages. Second, it will categorize different types of specificity according to the semantic and pragmatic contexts in which they can be found. The standard tests for these different kinds of specificity are also discussed. In the third section a comparison is made between four families of theoretical approaches to specificity and the chapter concludes with the notion that specificity can be best understood by ‘referential anchoring’.