Reference in context

Reference and denotation are different things. Denotation is the ability of a linguistic expression to denote an object in virtue of our linguistic competence of the language we know, whose knowledge we put to use in the things we say and, in the speech acts, we make in virtue of those uses. Reference or referring is a linguistic act one accomplishes by using a certain expression in a given context and through a display of intentionality that occurs both through language, intended as a priori system for encoding and decoding propositional schemata that are patchy and underspecified for truth-values (Pietroski, 2005), and through the use of contextual clues, as used to resolve underspecification. A pragmeme (as defined by Mey, 2001) is a linguistic action, in the understanding of which context (and contextual clues, following Dascal, 2003) plays a crucial role in fixing the speaker’s intentions. Ideally, for understanding to occur, there should be a match between the speaker’s intentions and the hearer’s reconstruction of those intentions (if there is no such a match, language users have to come to an agreement as to how to use the referential expression and negotiate a commonality between them, leading to an emerging, constructed intention (Kecskes, Forthcoming)). The speaker normally knows how to use context so that it bears on the interpretation of a language use of an expression. In this paper, I start with pronominals and then move on to consideration of proper names. Proper names refer to referents, albeit there is no unique relation between the name and the referent, from a merely semantic point of view. We do not learn the meanings of names the way we do for lexemes, as we are only made aware of and acquire rules of use for those names in context (at least, if we acquire the rules of use for lexemes, we master a certain generality in the conditions for their uses; such a generality is missing in the case of most proper names). Context should somehow specify this relationship between the name and the referent it is used for. Fictional names are another sort of case. In this case, descriptive meaning collaborates with and comes to the aid of speaker’s intentions (although theories about the conceptual properties of names are on the decline, they are still useful in some limited cases). Names, pronominals and NPs in poetic contexts may require even more specific considerations. Proper names, in some contexts, can be used but, due to the instructions therein contained (the rules of the language game played by language users (Wittgenstein, 1953)) do not trigger a search for the referent, while some others do. The context in point is that of the lecture room, where a grammar teacher exemplifies grammatical rules through examples. If the teacher says “The cat is sitting on the mat” nobody will look for the cat in question or reply ‘No, Fido is not sitting on the mat’. In some of such examples, names will not trigger a search for the referent, while other lexical combinations do. It may be interesting to see why in some cases context requires a non-referential interpretation (as the hearer does not even bother to search for the referent), while in others it requires a referential one. Finally, I want to examine examples with the future tense. Normal NPs and Proper Names, as used in the future, may select or not select an object. Quantification of the object, if the latter exists, normally occurs in the present (in other words there is a state e, such that there is an object X in e (states and events, following Higginbotham, 2000 may be reduced to one ontological category). However, if the object is under construction, existential quantification will take place in the future (or it may be split between the present and the future, if we consider a building under construction, in which part of the object (say a few bricks) exists in the present. If the object is under destruction, then existential quantification cannot occur in the future, but has to apply in the present (see Asher, 2000 for a discussion of creation and destruction verbs). Vast slices of knowledge interact with the interpretation of such NPs. Going back to proper names, we may consider a child who will be born in the future, but whose undeveloped state or organism exists in the present in the form of a living creature. Here (in a sentence like “John will be a very clever child, if he is like his father”) we may have quantification both in the present and in the future and an anaphoric link between the object in the present and that in the future. The analogy between a few bricks and a developing growing form of human life is quite compelling. The difference may lie in the fact that in the former example, intentionality is what confers the bricks a role in the complete building (in addition to being part of the whole). In the case of the growing living organism, it is no question of intentionality (even if we admit that negative intentionality may play a role in stopping the growing organism from growing). Even if the parents had no intention of giving birth to a child, unless they did something to stop this, they could not prevent the growing organism from being born and becoming a child. I am not saying anything about when some agglomerate of human cells becomes a growing human organism. I am not saying anything about the soul or anything about morality. I am solely thinking of the interpretation problem of proper names as used in the future as something that may require presupposing two things, one in the present (or future) and one in the past.