Goals of referring acts
Amichai Kronfeld · 1987
MotivationA pragmatic theory of reference is a theory that specifies and explains the human competence to use referring expressions in order to achieve certain goals.Since the relation between referring expressions and speaker's goals is what needs explaining, it is natural to consider referring as planned action [1,4,5].This, in turn, requires showing how the use of referring expressions is systematically related to changes in the hearer's mental state.For that purpose, we need to know the speaker's goals concerning the hearer's mental state, and therefore, a pragmatic theory of referring must first of all specify and describe the goals that typically motivate the use of referring expressions.It is with such goals that this paper is concerned.The view that the referring act is a planned effort to achieve certain goals through linguistic means simply follows from the fact that referring is a speech act: all speech acts