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Referring to ‘What Counts as the Referent’: A View from Linguistics

2013; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_10

2214-3815

Keith Allan,

Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies

As defined here, a speaker's act of referring is the speaker's use of a language expression in the course of talking about its denotatum. This pragmatic definition of reference is defended against more traditional usage that contrasts "referring", "denoting", "describing", "alluding", "attributing", etc. It is proposed that the various differences in meaning supposedly captured by the different applications of these terms are better dealt with in other ways that can make sharper distinctions. What the hearer recognizes as the speaker's referent necessarily only 'counts as the referent' because it is on many occasions not identical to what the speaker identifies, indeed the speaker and hearer might even have entirely contradictory conceptions of the referent and yet the language expression used by the speaker can be said to successfully refer. Consider some examples. In President Clinton was a baby in 1946 the speaker refers to (on my definition) two temporally distinct manifestations of Bill Clinton. If Sue says to Ed My husband's having an affair with his boss it is perfectly possible for Ed (and us) to understand which two persons are being referred to in such a way as to distinguish them in subsequent discourse, even though neither Ed nor us have ever met either of them. Sue's referent for "my husband" will not be identical with Ed's referent, though the referent for each of speaker and hearer counts as the same for the given occasion of talk. If the Archbishop of Canterbury says to Richard Dawkins I will offer proof of the existence of God and Dawkins replies But God does not exist, the deity that they are both referring to only counts as the same referent, because for the Archbishop God exists and for the author of The God Delusion God does not; in fact they have almost contradictory conceptions of the referent. This essay argues that an expression e frequently cannot identify exactly the same referent r for speaker and hearer, and that it is in fact unnecessary for it to do so; all that is required is that the referent counts as the same referent for the purpose of the communication. This is why mistaken reference like Who's the teetotaller with the glass of water? spoken of a man quaffing a glass of vodka can often successfully communicate who it is that is being spoken of; and attributives like the subject NP of The person who designed Stonehenge was a genius refers to whomsoever the designer was just as efficiently as The architect of La Sagrada Família was a genius refers, implicitly, to Antoni Gaudí.