22.360, Disc: Review of 'Reference'

[linguist at LINGUISTLIST.ORG]

LINGUIST List: Vol-22-360. Thu Jan 20 2011. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 22.360, Disc: Review of 'Reference'

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews: Veronika Drake, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Eric Raimy, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
       <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Elyssa Winzeler <elyssa at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm.

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 16-Jan-2011
From: Barbara Abbott [abbottb at msu.edu]
Subject: Review of 'Reference'
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:38:56
From: Barbara Abbott [abbottb at msu.edu]
Subject: Review of 'Reference'

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=22-360.html&submissionid=4012338&topicid=5&msgnumber=1
  


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. 


Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language
                     Pragmatics
                     Semantics




-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-22-360	
----------------------------------------------------------