Reference and representation of pronouns

Heusinger, Klaus von

doi:10.1075/la.52.09heu

Cited by 30 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…(cf. Lewis 1979;Grosz et al 1995;Mount 2008;von Heusinger 2002von Heusinger , 2006. This approach to descriptions has been proposed by Lewis (1979) and was later developed by von Heusinger (2006Heusinger ( , 2013.…”

Section: Salience Theory Of Referencementioning

confidence: 99%

Are Descriptions Really Descriptive? An Experimental Study on Misdescription and Reference

Rostworowski

Pietrulewicz

2018

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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This paper presents an experimental study on definite descriptions. According to the classical views, a definite description, i.e., a phrase of the form Bthe F^, hasroughly speaking-purely descriptive semantics, that is, it designates the object which uniquely (opt. uniquely in a context) satisfies the description. However, as several philosophers including Keith Donnellan have argued, there are uses of definite descriptions on which these expressions do not seem to designate objects which satisfy the descriptions. Namely, a description may refer in some circumstances to an object which does not have the property from the description. This argument is called Bthe Argument from misdescription^and it is raised against the classical views on the semantics of definite descriptions. In our paper, we present an experimental study on misdescription and explored reactions of ordinary users of language to various statements involving misdescriptions. The results of our research indicate that the intuition of ordinary speakers is consistent with the prediction expressed in the Argument from misdescription. We argue that the most common pragmatic explanation of misdescription, appealing to Gricean distinction between saying and meaning, is unconvincing. We vote for an alternative semantic account of definite descriptions, on which a description Bthe F^designates an object being F, which is at the same time the most salient individual according to a contextually established ranking of salience.

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Section: Salience Theory Of Referencementioning

confidence: 99%

Are Descriptions Really Descriptive? An Experimental Study on Misdescription and Reference

Rostworowski

Pietrulewicz

2018

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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“…If it is not the case, 5 then ∀belard chooses one of its non-logical constants, an individual constant a i , a function symbol f j or a relation symbol R k , and the game goes on. 6 When ∀belard chooses an individual constant a i , ∃loise has to pick out an object in the domain; if she has selected the right value, i.e. the very extension of a i , then she wins the play and ∀belard loses.…”

Section: Atomic Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is the case of Hintikka's [8] conception of strategic meaning according to which the context restricts the set of available winning strategies. Von Heusinger [6] provides a uniform semantic representation for pronouns: "Pronouns are understood as referring to the most salient individual in the context so far, and are represented as indexed epsilon terms that are interpreted by a choice function [which] reconstructs the salience structure of the context." Therefore, the role played by the context in the setting of the relevant choice functions appears to be a pervarsive feature of NL semantic theories involving such functions.…”

Section: (I) Contextual Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Extended Game-Theoretical Semantics

Rebuschi¹

2011

Between Logic and Reality

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“…For example, we can accept Donnellen's (1966) distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions without first being committed to whether the distinction is to be found in the semantics or pragmatics. 2 Outside of Philosophy it is common to speak of proper names, descriptions and complex demonstratives as having anaphoric or dependent uses (von Heusinger 2002;Huang 2000;Mitkov 2002). 3 As Fine emphasizes, representing as the same is different from representing to be the same.…”

Section: A Prioricitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a certain view concerning the semantics of pronouns in which (at least in some uses) they refer to whatever object is most salient at their time of utterance (Bach 1994;von Heusinger 2002;Kripke 1977;Neale 2005). This view is meant to account for some uses of anaphoric pronouns and so may be extended to account for de jure coreference.…”

Section: Saliencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Coreference and meaning

Pinillos

2010

Philos Stud

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Sometimes two expressions in a discourse can be about the same thing in a way that makes that very fact evident to the participants. Consider, for example, 'he' and 'John' in 'John went to the store and he bought some milk'. Let us call this 'de jure' coreference. Other times, coreference is 'de facto' as with 'Mark Twain' and 'Samuel Clemens' in a sincere use of 'Mark Twain is not Samuel Clemens'. Here, agents can understand the speech without knowing that the names refer to the same person. After surveying many available linguistic and pragmatic tools (intentions to corefer, presuppositions, meanings, indexing, discourse referents, binding etc.) I conclude that we must posit a new semantic primitive to account for de jure coreference.

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Reference and representation of pronouns

Cited by 30 publications

References 22 publications

Are Descriptions Really Descriptive? An Experimental Study on Misdescription and Reference

Are Descriptions Really Descriptive? An Experimental Study on Misdescription and Reference

Extended Game-Theoretical Semantics

Coreference and meaning

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