Reference Study From The Perspectives Of Pragmatics And Cognition

Reference is one of the major topics in linguistics and cognitive science. In traditional semantics, reference theories aim to study the relationship between linguistic expressions and their referents, i.e. a correspondence or mapping between language and reality. This kind of research has been determining the fate of reference theory for a long time. However, due to the inherent limitations of this research, theories of reference have been evolving towards the pragmatic as well as cognitive perspectives:referring expressions are from absolutely definite to relatively indeterminate; the research methods are from anti-mentalist to intentional. The central theme of the study of reference is not only a static description of proper and general names, or an exploration of referentiality inside language, but a pursuit for the referent of words in the dynamic context.From the perspectives of pragmatics and cognition, this thesis describes and classifies referring expressions in language as comprehensively as possible. By presenting an overview of traditional theories of reference, and drawing insights from the latest developments in contemporary linguistics, this thesis explores both the pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms underlying a variety of referential phenomena with a view to constructing a novel pragmatic-cognitive model of reference under the theorectical framework of relevance activation and cognitve concept. By addressing the interaction between meaning, context and cognition, the thesis is a multidimensional survey of reference with a special focus on pragmatic referentiality. It begins with a critical review of some classic theories on reference and points out the inevitability of the pragmatic-cognitive turn in the study of reference. The first half of the thesis analyzes pragmatic referentiality with regard to referring expressions from the aspects of its definition, discourse principles and applications to indexicals. Starting from "Aspects of referentiality" (Chen,2009), the thesis primarily discusses the relative indeterminacy of pragmatic referentiality and spells out the pragmatic constraints on referentiality in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 explores how to determine the referent and maintain reference in spoken discourse. Following the theory of anaphora that Huang (1994/2007a) has constructed, the thesis delineates the antecedent search procedure for zero anaphors. Chapter 4 contributes to the discussion of the reference of indexicals, exploring what roles semantic decoding and pragmatic inference play in the interpretation of indexicals. The second half makes tentative research on a special use of referring expressions—deferred reference—from the perspectives of pragmatics and cognition. Chapter 5 seeks to discover the productive mechanism behind this phenomenon and introduces its image schema structure—deferred equative. Based on the previous conclusion, Chapter 6 points out that metaphoric reference and metonymic reference are different forms of deferred reference. The author analyzes the similarities and differences between them, and argues that the combination of cognitive concept and stimulus of relevance can be a good resolution to the interpretation of deferred reference. At last, based on the statement that "referring is a pragmatic act", the thesis outlines the future orientation in the field of pragmatic and cognitive studies on reference.The thesis puts an emphasis on deferred reference, which was first introduced by Nunberg (1978). It remains a hot topic in the study of linguisitics all over the world, but no one seems to seek the productive mechanism of this phenomenon from the perspecives of pragmatics and cognition. Therefore, the aim of the thesis is to discover its pragmatic and cognitive mechanism spelling out as:functional economy→semantic anomaly→defective repair-ability→utterance acceptability, which is a conventionalized, universal, pragmatic tendency in verbal communication.Deferred reference is also a universal language phenomenon, diversely displayed in different knids of languages around the world. Starting from the previous research on reference in English, the thesis also analyzes the application of referring expressions in Chinese. Thus, it becomes a comparison study between English and Chinese. The data are from English and Chinese, which can be complementary to each other. The thesis tries to find new evidences for the study of "how lanugage is generated and understood", for the purpose of exploring the universality in human cognition and language rules.