Is Reference Essential to Meaning?

Meaning and Reference

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Reference, Procedures and Implicitly Communicated Meaning*

This paper makes two main claims. Firstly, by taking seriously the idea that referring expressions carry information which interacts with relevance theory principles, we can formulate an account of referring expression use that does not rely on the linguistic marking of Accessibility, Givenness or similar notions. Secondly, a relevance-theoretic analysis allows us to look beyond the mere act of...

Inferring Generic Meaning From Pragmatic Reference Failure

Generic sentences (e.g., “birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about kinds, in contrast to non-generic sentences that express facts about specific individuals or sets of individuals (e.g., “all birds lay eggs”). Although generics are pervasive in natural language, there is no unique linguistic marker of genericity, making the identification of generics a challenge. We investigate the morpho...

"The Meaning of Life is to See"

Is Intonational Meaning Compositional ?

This paper addresses the issue of the contribution of intonation to the meaning of an utterance, and more precisely of the conditions that should be met to propose a compositional approach to the meaning of intonational contours. After presenting different positions in the literature and specifying if and how much these proposals can be said compositional, we show that their differences can be ...