Exploring the Reference Relation

public: Universal lexical entry that is available to the entire community of speakers. This is what most people typically mean by the expression “public word.” Abstract private: Mental lexicon entry that is private to an individual. This is (roughly speaking) the same thing as Origgi and Sperber’s second type of mental token.private: Mental lexicon entry that is private to an individual. This is (roughly speaking) the same thing as Origgi and Sperber’s second type of mental token. Concrete public: The publicly available features of an uttered word. This is like Origgi and Sperber’s concept of the public token of an utterance. Concrete private: An individual’s perceptual representation of a specific utterance. This corresponds broadly to Origgi and Sperber’s first type of mental token. The central question can be put very briefly: What is the reference relation? It is obviously some sort of a mapping, but it is difficult to say what it is a mapping from or to. On an I-language approach, it makes the most sense to talk about reference as a relation that hold between two sorts of mental domain. Specifically, it would be a mapping between a speaker’s conceptual mental model of the world, and either a concrete private or abstract private word. This is because on the I-language approach, reference is simply another property of the language faculty. And since the language faculty is located in the mind, that is where we will find its properties as well. Ludlow (2003) discusses three different sorts of reference relation, which he terms R , R , and R . Broadly speaking, R relations are what model-theoretic semantic theories use to map natural language onto some other sort of mental representation. Assuming that the natural language they speak of is of the I-language flavor, then R type reference relations would map the abstract private onto the conceptual world. On the other end of the spectrum of the possible Ludlowian reference relations are the R relations. These are mappings external to any particular speaker from words to things in the world. They exist independently of us; we somehow are able to come to know these