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 referring and account for the extra work that referring expressions do in contributing to what is implicated rather than explicitly expressed. This idea is missing from most accounts and it goes a long way towards explaining the choices made by speakers when selecting one referential expression rather than another.