Reference Interdisciplinary Perspectives

The ability to produce and understand referring expressions is basic tohuman language use and human cognition. Reference comprises the ability to thinkof and represent objects (both real and imagined/fictional), to indicate toothers which of these objects we are talking about, and to determine what othersare talking about when they use a nominal expression. The articles in this volume are concerned with some of the central themes andchallenges in research on reference within the cognitive sciences - philosophy(including philosophy of language and mind, logic, and formal semantics),theoretical and computational linguistics, and cognitive psychology. The papersaddress four basic questions: What is reference? What is the appropriateanalysis of different referring forms, such as definite descriptions? How isreference resolved? and How do speaker/writers select appropriate referringforms, such as pronouns vs. full noun phrases, demonstrative vs. personalpronouns, and overt vs. null/zero pronominal forms? Some of the papers assumeand build on existing theories, such as Centering Theory and the GivennessHierarchy framework; others propose their own models of reference understandingor production. The essays examine reference from a number of disciplinary andinterdisciplinary perspectives, informed by different research traditions andemploying different methodologies. While the contributors to the volume wereprimarily trained in one of the four represented disciplines-computer science,linguistics, philosophy and psychology, and use methodologies typical of thatdiscipline, each of them bridges more than one discipline in their methodologyand/or their approach.

Jeanette Gundel is Professor of Linguistics, University of Minnesota.
Nancy Hedberg is Professor of Lingusitics, Simon Fraser University.