Reference

Key Notions

The technical term reference is closely connected to the terms referent, act of reference, referential expressions, and refer to. To understand how these terms are related and used, consider the place name Rome. English speakers generally use this name to refer to the capital of Italy in conversations. The referent of this expression is the real-life city, with its inhabitants and history. The act of reference is performed when speakers use this expression in a context, such as when suggesting they might go to Rome for a holiday. Reference, then, is the term used to describe this general category of linguistic concepts.

The notion of reference is tightly connected to that of sense, defined as the set of properties or “mental fingers” that allow speakers to use words and their meanings to refer to entities in the world. Acts of reference can thus be conceived as inherently relational, if one takes a psychological perspective. An act of reference can establish a relation between a mind-internal token instantiating the sense of a word and a referent as the mind-external object it refers to. When speakers use the place name Rome, they associate their concept of this city (i.e., its token) with the city itself (i.e., the referent). The sense of the name Rome and its use in a sentence are the linguistic elements establishing this relation.

Reference is not a notion that is restricted to names and nouns, hence the use of the term referential expression. For instance, indexical expressions (or deixes) always refer to specific aspects of the context. The spatial deixis here and the temporal deixis now always refer to the speaker’s location and utterance time (deixis). Similarly, personal pronouns such as I always refer to the speaker of an utterance, although in often subtle manners (semantics). Reference can thus connect the meanings of linguistic expressions to different entities, such as cities, places, and moments in time.

Reference is generally defined at the level of phrases, one example being the definite noun phrase the dog. The sense of the common noun dog individuates a class of domestic animals. In combination with the and its sense, however, the dog is a noun phrase that can be used to refer to a specific dog in a context. For instance, one can use the sentence the dog is barking to refer to a specific barking dog, in this example, a dog named Sparkie. Crucially, acts of reference may be unsuccessful. If a speaker uses this sentence in a context in which there are two dogs (e.g., Sparkie and Laika), then interlocutors may not be able to figure out to which dog the speaker is referring to. The act of reference is said to fail, as the participants in this conversation cannot align themselves in the use of this referential expression.

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