Referring Expressions, Pragmatics, and Style: Reference and Beyond

Reference is a major theme in the study of language and language use. Providing a relevance-theoretic account of reference resolution, this book develops our understanding of procedurally encoded meaning by exploring its function and role in reference resolution. A range of referring expressions are discussed, including definite descriptions, demonstratives and pronouns. Existing work on the pragmatics of reference has largely focused on how reference is resolved. However, speakers can do m...