Inhalt: | Reference, the ability to refer to and pick out entities, is essential to human language and thought/cognition. The chapters in this volume attempt to provide a state of the art overview of this ability. The book is divided into two sections. The chapters in Part I, Foundations, are concerned with basic questions related to different types of referring expression and their interpretation. They address questions about the role of the speaker (including speaker intentions) and of the addressee, as well as the contribution of (the semantics of) the linguistic forms themselves, in establishing reference. They are also concerned with the nature of such concepts as definite and indefinite reference and specificity and the conditions under which reference may fail. The chapters in Part II, Implications and Applications, address questions about the acquisition of reference by children, and the processing of reference in the brain (neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics) as well as by machines, including robots (computational linguistics). |
