Discussion Details
| Title: | Review of 'Reference' |
| Submitter: | Barbara Abbott |
| Description: | Read Review: http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-267.html
I’d like to thank Maria Averintseva-Klisch for her review of my 2010 book Reference. Her main negative comments were that my book was too narrowly semantic in focus and did not give work on the pragmatics of reference sufficient attention. In my defense I would just like to make a couple of comments. The first is clarificatory: in discussing my criticisms of Kent Bach in the last chapter of the book, she suggests that I would like to “reduce the pragmatic concept of reference to a criterion for the definition of semantic reference”. But I do not have any such desire. Indeed, I described *Bach* as making consistency in pragmatic reference the criterion for semantic reference (as Averintseva-Klisch acknowledges), but that was a view I was criticizing, and not my own. My second comment is that I wrote the book believing that the title was going to be Reference and Noun Phrase Interpretation, which was the title I had submitted my proposal under. However it emerged, a month or so before I submitted the completed manuscript, that the publishers were assuming the title was simply Reference (despite what my contract said), and that they preferred the shorter title. I probably should have insisted on the longer title, which would have given a better indication of the contents. |
| Date Posted: | 20-Jan-2011 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Philosophy of Language
Pragmatics Semantics |
| LL Issue: | 22.360 |
| Posted: | 20-Jan-2011 |
