Mental Representations: Reference and Definiteness, Part 1: the Basic Communicative Act. Action of Discourse on Expressions. Reference

If D denotes a discourse, and p an expression in an utterance u of D, the action, D(p), of D on p, is the set of mental representations of the interpretations of p in D, and corresponds to the discourse 'meaning' of p in D. The correspondence p->D(p) is called the reference of the speaker. The domain, dom(p), is defined, and it is shown that the set i(D(p)) of underlying entities of D(p) is contained in or equal to dom(p). A reference is inclusive if i(D(p)) = dom(p); exclusive otherwise. If dom(p) (resp. i(D(p))) consists of a single entity, the reference is said to be unique (resp unambiguous). Definite reference is defined as unambiguous and inclusive. It is shown that definite reference is unique in the classical sense, and it is conjectured that a generalization of the notion of 'familiarity' holds. A number of putative counterexamples to the classical definition are shown to satisfy the more general definition. Other application is made to specificity, predicate nominals, and parameterized nominals. 5 VITA I received my Ph.D. in mathematics in 1964 from Brandeis University. After a number of years at Lowell Technological Institute and SUNY-Plattsburgh, I retired in 1985 and went back to school at the Monterey Institute of International Studies to study for an M.A. in TESOL. In 1991 I went to Egypt to study Arabic and teach English. In Monterey I had developed an interest in linguistics, and I continued this when I came back to the States. My current interests are in the pragmatics of pronominal reference, Arabic prosody, and more recently, preposings, definiteness and the coherence of discourse. 6 INTRODUCTION.(Note:the footnotes in the original word document did not transfer to the pdf version, so I have appendedthem at the end of the paper. The purpose of this paper is to give alternative definitions, using the notion of 'mental representation' developed in (Riley 1999, 2000), for some of the fundamental concepts of present-day linguistics: identifiability, reference, specificity and definiteness. The theory of mental representations enables us to simplify and clarify these notions, and gives, I think, a more psycho-linguistically sound development of these basic ideas of linguistic communication. The meaning of the terms identifiability, reference, specificity and definiteness is subject to considerable variation, different authors adopting one or the other of several meanings according to the purpose of their work. For identifiability and definiteness, reference may be made to …