Abbott - Reference

Reference

OXFORD SURVEYS IN SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

GENERAL EDITORS: Chris Barker, New York University, and Chris Kennedy, University of Chicago

ADVISORY EDITORS: Kent Bach, San Francisco State University; Jack Hoeksema, University of Groningen; Laurence R. Horn, Yale University; William Ladusaw, University of Southern California; Beth Levin, Stanford University; Richard Larson, Stony Brook University; Anna Szabolsci, New York University; Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh; Gregory Ward, Northwestern University

PUBLISHED
1 Modality
Paul Portner

2 Reference
Barbara Abbott

IN PREPARATION
Intonation and Meaning
Daniel Bring

Questions
Veneeta Dayal

Indefiniteness
Donka Farkas and Henriette de Swart

Aspect
Hana Filip

Lexical Pragmatics
Laurence R. Horn

Subjectivity and Perspective in Truth-Theoretic Semantics
Peter Lasersohn

Mood
Paul Portner

Dimensions of Meaning
Chris Potts

BARBARA ABBOTT

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

Barbara Abbott 2010

The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published 2010 by Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009941584

Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
MPG Biddles Ltd., Kings Lynn, Norfolk

ISBN 9780199202577 (Hbk.)
9780199203451 (Pbk.)

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

I am immensely grateful to the series editors, Chris Barker and Chris Kennedy, for encouraging me to take part in this series, persisting in their confidence throughout the process, and providing helpful comments on the almost-completed manuscript. John Davey, our Oxford manager, has been an absolute peach to work with. Many conversations, electronic and otherwise, have been very useful in checking facts, providing examples, tracking down references, uncovering historical background, and generally providing vital pieces of information: in particular I would like to thank (in no significant order) Mandy Simons, Eduardo Garca-Ramrez, Hans Kamp, Jeff Pelletier, Larry Horn, Ora Matushansky, sten Dahl, Barbara Partee, Paul Elbourne, Grover Hudson, Greg Carlson, Lyn Frazier, Ezra Keshet, Ray Jackend-off, Erin Eaker, Richard Larson, Polly Jacobson, and Bob Matson. The Michigan State University Library has also been essential. I would like to thank the Leelanau County Walkie Talkies, especially Lyn Motlow and Kathy Turner, for their interest and encouragement. Kent Bach, whose work on reference has had a substantial influence on me, read Chapter 11 and gave me many very useful comments on it. I hope that he is not too disappointed with the final outcome. Carol Slater and Rich Hall (members of the long-standing mid-Michigan Philosophy Discussion Group) read several chapters in their early stages and did a lot to help me get going in the right direction. Carol also read the completed manuscript, and Im very grateful to her for her wonderfully apt and detailed suggestions for improvement, many of which have been incorporated verbatim without acknowledgement into the final text. My brother Porter Abbott gave me useful feedback on several chapters, and instantly identified a couple of obscure literary references. My in-house philosopher Larry Hauser has provided all kinds of help throughout the processwelcome words of encouragement, useful observations, and creative suggestions (some of which unfortunately could not be usede.g. the suggestion that the book should be titled The Sex Lives of Noun Phrases). In addition, he read late-stage versions of all of the chapters and still managed to come up with many much-needed improvements. My biggest debt is owed to Jeanne Dapkus, who read each and every chapter in more than one version and was untiring in providing detailed comments every time. Her perspective as the sort of intelligent non-specialist I like to write for was invaluable, and her keen insight and enthusiasm have gone substantially above and beyond what any author has any business hoping for.

Barbara Abbott

Michigan
July 2009

Oxford Surveys in Semantics and Pragmatics aims to convey to the reader the life and spirit of the study of meaning in natural language. Its volumes provide distillations of the central empirical questions driving research in contemporary semantics and pragmatics, and distinguish the most important lines of inquiry into these questions. Each volume offers the reader an overview of the topic at hand, a critical survey of the major approaches to it, and an assessment of what consensus (if any) exists. By putting empirical puzzles and theoretical debates into a comprehensible perspective, each author seeks to provide orientation and direction to the topic, thereby providing the context for a deeper understanding of both the complexity of the phenomena and the crucial features of the semantic and pragmatic theories designed to explain them. The books in the series offer researchers in linguistics and related areasincluding syntax, cognitive science, computer science, and philosophyboth a valuable resource for instruction and reference and a state-of-the-art perspective on contemporary semantic and pragmatic theory from the experts shaping the field.

In this book, Barbara Abbott explains the major lines of thought about reference, confronting what is arguably the most basic question of all for semantic and pragmatic theory: what is the link between words and the world? We routinely use language to convey information about the world to each other; however, the exact mechanisms by which words and phrases come to be about things in the world remain mysterious. Over the course of the past century, many significant advances in our overall understanding of natural language meaning have followed from advances in our understanding and conception of the reference relation. In this book, Professor Abbott provides us with an accessible, comprehensive, and enjoyable guide to the intellectual and empirical landscape of reference, which we expect to stimulate new lines of inquiry on this central question of meaning, even as it explains and elucidates old ones.