Referring expression
Encyclopedia
A referring expression, in linguistics, is any noun phrase, or surrogate for a noun phrase, whose function in a text (spoken, signed or written on a particular occasion) is "pick out" someone an individual person, place, object, or a set of persons, places, objects, etc. The technical terminology for "pick out" differs a great deal from one school of linguistics to another. The most widespread term is probably refer, and a thing "picked out" is a referent, as for example in the work of John Lyons
. In linguistics, the study of reference belongs to pragmatics
, the study of language use, though it is also a matter of great interest to philosophers, especially those wishing to understand the nature of knowledge
, perception
and cognition
more generally.
The kinds of expressions which can refer (as so defined) are:
Referring can take place in a number of ways. Typically, in the case of (1), the RE is likely to succeed in picking out the referent because the words in the expression and the way they are combined together give a true, accurate, description of the referent, in such a way that the hearer of the expression can recognize the speaker's intention. In the first example, if the hearer knows what an apple and a table are, and understands the relation expressed by on, and is aware that the is a signal that an individual thing/person is intended, s/he can build up the meaning of the expression from the words and grammar and use it to identify an intended object (often within sight, or at any rate easily recoverable, but not necessarily). Of course, the speaker may use a mistaken description and still manage to refer successfully. If I ask you to "Take this plate to the woman with the glass of vodka", you may take it to the intended person even if, unbeknown to me, her vodka is really water. On the other hand I may be accurate in calling it vodka, but you may believe wrongly that it is water, and therefore not deliver the plate. So accurate reference is not a guarantee of successful reference, and successful reference does not wholly depend on accurate reference. But naturally there is a strong positive correlation between them.
Proper names, on the other hand, generally achieve reference irrespective of the meaning of the words which constitute them (if any are recognizable). If my local pub is called The Anchor, this is simply a label which functions conversationally with no appeal to the meaning of the words. If I say, I'm going to the Anchor, I do not mean I'm going to the device for halting and securing a ship, and you will not necessarily call such a device to mind when I say this. The Anchor just serves to identify a particular building. This point is more obvious still with those names like Sarah and London which have no lexical meaning of their own.
In addition to the (in many languages) grammatically obvious singular and plural reference, linguists typically distinguish individual or specific reference, exemplified by each case presented so far, from generic reference, where a singular expression picks out a type of object (etc.) rather than an individual one, as in The bear is a dangerous animal. Plural expressions can, of course, be interpreted in the same way, as in Bears are dangerous animals.
Definite reference to single individuals is usually taken to be the prototypical type of reference.
Other types of reference recognized by linguists include indefinite as opposed to definite reference, and collective and distributive reference. Definite referring expressions refer to an identifiable individual or class (The Dalai Lama; The Coldstream Guards; the student with the highest marks), whilst indefinite referring expressions allow latitude in identifying the referent (a corrupt Member of Parliament; a cat with black ears - where a is to be interpreted as 'any' or 'some actual but unspecified'). Collective reference is the picking out of the members of a set as a set, whilst distributive reference is the picking out of the members of a set individually. The difference may not be marked linguistically, but arrived at by interpretation in context. Compare Manchester United won again today (where the reference of Manchester United is to members of the team as a unit), with Manchester United wear red shirts and black shorts (where the reference of Manchester United is to the team members as individuals). English allows such expressions to be ambiguous: compare Manchester United are rich beyond my wildest dreams.
Some technical linguistic characteristics of referring expressions
REs carry a presupposition of the existence of the referent(s), in some universe of discourse, including fictional universes (in which Oliver Twist
, Noddy, Daleks, Mansfield Park
, Atlantis
, purgatory
, the man with the golden gun, phlogiston, and the invisible pink unicorn
"exist").
There are many other technical issues surrounding the nature of reference. Some of these are discussed from the perspective of linguistics in Lyons (1977, vol. I: chapter 7); Cann (1993: chapters 9 and 10); Saeed (1997: chapters 2, 7, 11). There is a vast literature on the topic in philosophy.
is a subtask of Natural language generation
(NLG), which involves
creating referring expressions that identify specific entities to the reader. A variety of algorithms have been developed in the NLG community to generate different types of referring expressions.
John Lyons (linguist)
Sir John Lyons, LittD, FBA is an English linguist, most famous for his work on semantics.John Lyons was educated at St Bede's College, Manchester, and at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in Classics in 1953 and a Diploma in Education in 1954. After doing his national service in...
. In linguistics, the study of reference belongs to pragmatics
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
, the study of language use, though it is also a matter of great interest to philosophers, especially those wishing to understand the nature of knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
, perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
and cognition
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
more generally.
The kinds of expressions which can refer (as so defined) are:
- a noun phrase of any structure, such as: the taxi in The taxi's waiting outside; the apple on the table in Bring me the apple on the table; and those five boys in Those five boys were off school last week. In those languages which, like English, encode definitenessDefinitenessIn grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context and entities which are not ....
, REs are typically marked for definiteness. In the examples given, this is done by the definite article the or the demonstrative adjective, here those.
- a noun-phrase surrogate, i.e. a pronoun, such as it in It's waiting outside and Bring me it; and they in They were off school last week. The referent of such a pronoun may vary according to context - e.g. the referent of me depends on who the speaker is - and this property is technically an instance of deixisDeixisIn linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place...
.
- a proper nameProper name"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"...
, like Sarah, London, The Eiffel Tower, or The Beatles. The intimate link between proper names and type (1) REs is shown by the definite article that appears in many of them. In many languages this happens far more consistently than in English. Proper names are often taken to refer, in principle, to the same referent independently of the context in which the name is used and in all possible worlds, i.e. they are in Saul KripkeSaul KripkeSaul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center...
's terminology rigid designators.
Referring can take place in a number of ways. Typically, in the case of (1), the RE is likely to succeed in picking out the referent because the words in the expression and the way they are combined together give a true, accurate, description of the referent, in such a way that the hearer of the expression can recognize the speaker's intention. In the first example, if the hearer knows what an apple and a table are, and understands the relation expressed by on, and is aware that the is a signal that an individual thing/person is intended, s/he can build up the meaning of the expression from the words and grammar and use it to identify an intended object (often within sight, or at any rate easily recoverable, but not necessarily). Of course, the speaker may use a mistaken description and still manage to refer successfully. If I ask you to "Take this plate to the woman with the glass of vodka", you may take it to the intended person even if, unbeknown to me, her vodka is really water. On the other hand I may be accurate in calling it vodka, but you may believe wrongly that it is water, and therefore not deliver the plate. So accurate reference is not a guarantee of successful reference, and successful reference does not wholly depend on accurate reference. But naturally there is a strong positive correlation between them.
Proper names, on the other hand, generally achieve reference irrespective of the meaning of the words which constitute them (if any are recognizable). If my local pub is called The Anchor, this is simply a label which functions conversationally with no appeal to the meaning of the words. If I say, I'm going to the Anchor, I do not mean I'm going to the device for halting and securing a ship, and you will not necessarily call such a device to mind when I say this. The Anchor just serves to identify a particular building. This point is more obvious still with those names like Sarah and London which have no lexical meaning of their own.
In addition to the (in many languages) grammatically obvious singular and plural reference, linguists typically distinguish individual or specific reference, exemplified by each case presented so far, from generic reference, where a singular expression picks out a type of object (etc.) rather than an individual one, as in The bear is a dangerous animal. Plural expressions can, of course, be interpreted in the same way, as in Bears are dangerous animals.
Definite reference to single individuals is usually taken to be the prototypical type of reference.
Other types of reference recognized by linguists include indefinite as opposed to definite reference, and collective and distributive reference. Definite referring expressions refer to an identifiable individual or class (The Dalai Lama; The Coldstream Guards; the student with the highest marks), whilst indefinite referring expressions allow latitude in identifying the referent (a corrupt Member of Parliament; a cat with black ears - where a is to be interpreted as 'any' or 'some actual but unspecified'). Collective reference is the picking out of the members of a set as a set, whilst distributive reference is the picking out of the members of a set individually. The difference may not be marked linguistically, but arrived at by interpretation in context. Compare Manchester United won again today (where the reference of Manchester United is to members of the team as a unit), with Manchester United wear red shirts and black shorts (where the reference of Manchester United is to the team members as individuals). English allows such expressions to be ambiguous: compare Manchester United are rich beyond my wildest dreams.
Reference and denotation
This is an important distinction. Denotation is the relation existing between a lexical item and a set of potential referents in some world. Reference is the relation between some expression and actual referents (subject to the technical restriction given above). The word rabbit denotes the entire class of objects that are classified with this term, whilst the RE my rabbit will generally refer, on a particular occasion of usage, to the one individual in my possession. Generally speaking, lexical items have denotation, whilst phrases have the job of doing reference in real situations. This distinction is not systematically made by some linguists.Some technical linguistic characteristics of referring expressions
REs carry a presupposition of the existence of the referent(s), in some universe of discourse, including fictional universes (in which Oliver Twist
Oliver Twist (character)
Oliver Twist is the protagonist of the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. He was the first child protagonist in an English language novel.-Background:...
, Noddy, Daleks, Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park may mean:* Mansfield Park by Jane Austen* Mansfield Park , based on the novel, directed by Patricia Rozema, starring Frances O'Connor, Embeth Davidtz, and Sheila Gish in 1999...
, Atlantis
Atlantis
Atlantis is a legendary island first mentioned in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written about 360 BC....
, purgatory
Purgatory
Purgatory is the condition or process of purification or temporary punishment in which, it is believed, the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for Heaven...
, the man with the golden gun, phlogiston, and the invisible pink unicorn
Invisible Pink Unicorn
The Invisible Pink Unicorn is the goddess of a parody religion used to satirize theistic beliefs, taking the form of a unicorn that is paradoxically both invisible and pink...
"exist").
There are many other technical issues surrounding the nature of reference. Some of these are discussed from the perspective of linguistics in Lyons (1977, vol. I: chapter 7); Cann (1993: chapters 9 and 10); Saeed (1997: chapters 2, 7, 11). There is a vast literature on the topic in philosophy.
Referring Expressions Generation
Referring expression generationReferring expression generation
Referring expression generation is a subtask of Natural language generation , which involvescreating referring expressions that identify specific entities to the reader...
is a subtask of Natural language generation
Natural language generation
Natural Language Generation is the natural language processing task of generating natural language from a machine representation system such as a knowledge base or a logical form...
(NLG), which involves
creating referring expressions that identify specific entities to the reader. A variety of algorithms have been developed in the NLG community to generate different types of referring expressions.