Abstract
In this paper I am concerned with the speaker as an “artist” who creates coherence by guiding listeners to select precise referents for noun phrases. This guidance is not the referring of symbols to things which characterises all language, but a particular referring which marks out some noun phrases as requiring more information in order to be understood, and other noun phrases as requiring no further information. I wish to argue that it is extremely risky to assess the speaker’s artistry solely from an analysis of the speaker’s performance. The art of referring, I will argue, lies in the guidance it gives to the listener. Therefore, to judge the art we must examine not only the speaker’s production, but also the listener’s experience of that production.
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© 1978 Plenum Press, New York
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Rochester, S.R. (1978). Reference as a Speech Art: An Argument for Studying the Listener. In: Campbell, R.N., Smith, P.T. (eds) Recent Advances in the Psychology of Language. NATO Conference Series, vol 4b. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-2532-1_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-2532-1_18
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