Word and concept reference

Marked forms of words - Inflection, Derivation, Declension, Conjugation · Diminutive, Augmentative

Groups and categories and properties of words - Syntactic and lexical categories · Grammatical cases · Correlatives · Expletives · Adjuncts

Words and meaning - Morphology · Lexicology · Semiotics · Onomasiology · Figures of speech, expressions, phraseology, etc. · Word similarity · Ambiguity · Modality ·

Segment function, interaction, reference - Clitics · Apposition· Parataxis, Hypotaxis· Attributive· Binding · Coordinations · Word and concept reference

Sentence structure and style - Agreement · Ellipsis· Hedging

Phonology - Articulation · Formants· Prosody · Sound change · Intonation, stress, focus · Diphones · Intervocalic · Glottal stop · Vowel_diagrams · Elision · Ablaut_and_umlaut · Phonics

Speech processing · Praat notes · Praat plugins and toolkit notes · Praat scripting notes

Analyses, models, software - Minimal pairs · Concordances · Linguistics software · Some_relatively_basic_text_processing · Word embeddings · Semantic similarity

Unsorted - Contextualism · · Text summarization · Accent, Dialect, Language · Pidgin, Creole · Natural language typology · Writing_systems · Typography, orthography · Digraphs, ligatures, dipthongs · More linguistic terms and descriptions · Phonetic scripts

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Reference

In linguistics, reference often refers to one (or both) of:

reference from one word to another word, such as the relation between pronouns and nouns
the semantic reference from from a word to a concept (see lexicalisation) or real-world object

object is also addressed, as well as various details such as type/instance reference, interaction with abstract/proper nouns/names, and more.

In human understanding and computational interpretation, referent resolution is an important task, which quickly becomes a disambiguation process.

Related terms include

referent - the thing that is referred to, be it an object, action, state, attribute, or anything else you can talk about

referential realm - anything you can think to talk about

coreference - the concept of multiple references to the same referent

For example You said you would come.

See e.g. pronouns, and various anaphora.

Referent

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

The referent is the object a reference leads to -- something that is referred to (there does not seem to be a common term for the source of a reference - people seem to rephrase around this)

The concept is both used in the semantic sense (a word referring to the world, something you can wax philosophic about) and, apparently more commonly, in a sentence structure sense (e.g. a pronoun referring to a noun).

The default referent is often the most recent subject (antecedent) that lexically, semantically, and/or pragmatically matches well enough, though it can also refer to an object, action, state, relationship, attributes and probably more.

Note that even concrete things that we can refer to (such as a specific person or object) can be referred to in many different ways and styles.

Semantic theories might say that while there is one referent in the referential realm (that is, the realm of things we can refer to, talk about), there are various ways to refer to it. Such cases may (arguably) often be a little easier to resolve, since such concrete referents are often fairly unambiguous in themselves.

Deixis

Consider that words like 'tomorrow', 'there', and 'they' are often understood as reference that can only be resolved relative to the from a viewpoint created by their speaker.

Deixis (adjective: deictic) refers to words and phrases used to refer to e.g. time, place, person (and other aspects).

Deixis includes orientational reference in terms of time and space - who is speaking, when they were speaking, relative position, and more.

Consider the information that words like "I", "you", but also "here", "then", "this", "that", "go", "come" and such give you.

Sentence elements that are deictic, such as demonstratives, are not very meaningful (this happens particularly in dependent clauses) without resolving them, and resolving them requires picking the right context.

More formally, the origo is the context/viewpoint from which the reference is made and which must be understood for interpretation, and note that in natural conversation, it will move around.

Anaphora

(Note that in the context of rhetoric, anaphora refers to emphasis by repetition. While related, that sense is ignored here; the below details anaphora as it relates to reference.)

Anaphora is a reference that relies on (textual) context, often one expression that coreferences another expression.

For example, to just steal some of wikipedia's examples:

Pronouns:

in "Susan dropped the plate. It shattered loudly", the pronoun it refers to the plate
in "Because he was very cold, David put on his coat", the pronoun he points to "David"
in "The music stopped, and that upset everyone", the demonstrative pronoun that' points to the "The music stopped"

Note that pro-forms may be anaphora, but need not be.(verify)

Others:

in "Fred was angry, and so was I", the adverb so points to "angry"
in "If Sam buys a new bike, I shall do it as well", the verb phrase "do it" points to "buys a new bike"
in "In their free time, the boys play video games", the possessive adjective points to "the boys"

Direction

When anaphora are contrasted with cataphora, anaphora refer backwards in text or utterances (the assumed usual case) and cataphora refer forwards.

If the contrast is not made, anaphora might refer to both.

If you want to specifically say you don't know the direction, you might use endophora (endophoric anaphora), meaning references to something in the same text.

Exophora are references to things outside the text. For example:

in "This garden hose is better than that one", the demonstrative adjectives this and that point to entities in the situational context, not in the sentence.

in "Jerry is standing over there.", the adverb there points to a location in the situational context

Anaphora and omission

TODO

Interpretation (human or computational) will often try to resolve and bind endophoric anaphora where possible.

Exophora not so much.

Donkey anaphora

The terms donkey anaphora, donkey pronouns, donkey sentence, and possibly others, are named for a classical example: Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it..

It is primarily common sense that resolves which farmers beat how many donkeys.

You will probably find it obvious, but this comes from semantic/pragmatic level of everyday sense, because syntax alone doesn't get you there.

More technically, this refers to cases where binding (and the eventual meaning/interpretation) makes more sense at a semantic/pragmatic level than a syntactic one.

When machine interpretation wants to precisely mark up what's there, this is a problem, or at least a mismatch between mechanical and pragmatic interpretation.

Grounding

Grounding refers to establishing a time, location, or other situational detail, particularly when this is necessary for discourse.

In synthetic languages, inflection takes care of grounding to some noticeable degree.

Symbol grounding

The concept of symbol grounding is similar, but a different, somewhat more technical concept:

The relation of words with their concepts, which gets into semiotics, and cognitive aspects.

Demonstratives

Demonstratives (like this, that, these, those) indicate which entities are being referred to.

Demonstratives help us be brief within discourse with minimal ambiguity.

are determiners that is used deictically to indicate a referent's spatial, temporal, or discourse location.

Most demonstratives are deictic, in that their resolution (and so meaning) can be resolved from closeby context.

Not least because a lot of uses are spatial or temporal deixis. For example, many languages indicate distance, by having one set of demonstratives that are for closeby (e.g. this), another for further away (e.g. that).

Demonstratives can also refer to more abstract concepts, and topics probably count as that, which blurs the line towards anaphora (which often reference other expressions)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonstrative