Reference as a speech art
an argument for studying the listener
pp. 335-345
in: Robin N. Campbell, Philip T. Smith (eds), Recent advances in the psychology of language, Berlin, Springer, 1978Abstract
In this paper I am concerned with the speaker as an "artist" who creates coherence by guiding listeners to select precise referents for noun phrases. This guidance is not the referring of symbols to things which characterises all language, but a particular referring which marks out some noun phrases as requiring more information in order to be understood, and other noun phrases as requiring no further information. I wish to argue that it is extremely risky to assess the speaker's artistry solely from an analysis of the speaker's performance. The art of referring, I will argue, lies in the guidance it gives to the listener. Therefore, to judge the art we must examine not only the speaker's production, but also the listener's experience of that production.