Goals of Referring Acts 
Amichai Kronfeld 
AI Center 
and 
Center for the Study of Language and Information 
SRI International 
333 Ravenswood Avenue 
Menlo Park, CA 94025 
October 15, 1986 
1 Motivation 
A pragmatic theory of reference is a theory that specifies and explains the human com- 
petence to use referring expressions in order to achieve certain goals. Since the relation 
between referring expressions and speaker's goals is what needs explaining, it is natural to 
consider referring as planned action \[1,4,5\]. This, in turn, requires showing how the use of 
referring expressions is systematically related to changes in the hearer's mental state. For 
that purpose, we need to know the speaker's goals concerning the hearer's mental state, 
and therefore, a pragmatic theory of referring must first of all specify and describe the 
goals that typically motivate the use of referring expressions. It is with such goals that 
this paper is concerned. 
The view that the referring act is a planned effort to achieve certain goals through 
linguistic means simply follows from the fact that referring is a speech act: all speech acts 
are attempts to achieve certain goals through linguistic means. However, referring acts 
(and in general, propositional acts) are significantly different from illocutionary acts such 
as asserting and requesting: 
Literal goals. In performing one and the same speech act, a speaker may have many 
distinct goals. For example, by saying "The house's on fire!", a speaker may intend to 
inform the hearer that the house is on fire, scare the hearer half to death, as well as make 
the hearer leave. Only the first goal, however, is what I call a literal one 1. Literal goals 
are the goals of Gricean communication intentions, i.e., they are intended to be achieved 
1The term is taken from Kasher \[9\], where literal purposes are introduced. My use of the term, though, 
is slightly different. 
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partly through the recognition of the intention to achieve them. Thanks to Austin, Grice, 
Searle and others, we have a fairly clear notion of what the literal goals of illocutionary 
acts are. For example, the literal goal of a promise is to let the hearer know that the 
speaker places himself under an obligation to do something. But it is not clear at all what 
the literal goal of a referring act is. 
Conditions of satisfaction. Illocutionary acts have propositional content, but referring 
acts do not. The propositional content of an illocutionary act determines what Searle \[13\] 
calls its conditions of satisfaction: a request that the door be opened is satisfied iff someone 
opens the door, and an assertion that the door is closed is satisfied (true) iff the door is 
indeed closed. But since a referring act lacks propositional content, it is not clear what its 
conditions of satisfaction are 2 
Syntax and Semantics. In (direct) illocutionary acts, we have a fairly precise correla- 
tion between syntax and semantics on the one hand, and illocutionary point on the other. 
Assertions and commands, for example, have their syntactic counterparts in indicative and 
imperative sentences, and illocutionary points are represented by performative verbs. But 
while a serious utterance of an imperative sentence is almost always taken as a directive 
type of speech act, the serious utterance of a noun phrase - even a definite noun phrase - 
is not necessarily an act of referring. Similarly, one can promise, say, to pay one's debt by 
stating: "I hereby promise to pay my debt," but merely uttering "I hereby refer to a friend 
of mine" is hardly satisfactory. Thus, the semantic and syntactic clues that enable the 
hearer to recognize an illocutionary act do not help much as far as referring is concerned. 
Compositionality. The major difference between propositional acts and illocutionary 
ones is that the latter are constructed out of the former and not vice versa. Referring and 
predicating are related to illocutionary acts as the form and meaning of NP's and VP's 
are related to the form and meaning of a full sentence. In pragmatics, as in syntax and 
semantics, it must be shown how the whole is a function of its parts. One way of stating 
the problem is in terms of pragmatic presuppositions. The pragmatic presuppositions of a 
speech act can roughly be described as the class of propositions that is characteristically 
associated with felicitous performances of that speech act. The truth of these propositions 
is mutually believed to be taken for granted by the participants \[8\]. Now, it would be 
difficult to see how such a class of pragmatic presuppositions is generated, unless the 
pragmatic presuppositions associated with illocutionary acts are to a large extent a function 
of the pragmatic presuppositions associated with parts of the illocutionary acts, namely, 
propositional acts. For example, a pragmatic presupposition of the command "Show me 
the letter!" is that it is mutually believed that a certain letter exists and both speaker and 
hearer know which one it is. This pragmatic presupposition is generated through other 
2Note that specifying the conditions of satisfaction of a referring act is not the same as specifying its 
literal goal. The literal goal of a speech act and its conditions of satisfaction are usually distinct: If I tell 
you that I want the door closed and you understand me, the literal goal of my request is achieved. But it is 
still up to you whether or not to satisfy my request. 
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presuppositions that are associated with the propositional act of referring: for example, 
that it is mutually believed that the use of the definite article in this case signals an 
anaphoric link with a referring expression mentioned earlier. 
To sum up, we have four problems with respect to referring acts which seem harder to 
resolve than their corresponding problems in a theory of illocutionary acts: 
1. What is the literal goal of a referring act? 
2. What are its conditions of satisfaction? 
3. When is an NP a referring expression, and what role does its meaning play in the 
referring act? 
4. How does referring contribute to the success of illocutionary acts? 
In this paper I concentrate on the first two questions. I argue that in order to answer 
them, we must develop a pragmatic (as opposed to an epistem01ogical) concept of referent 
identification. I then sketch a model of referring that is capable of representing such a 
concept. 
2 Literal and Identification Goals 
The literal goal of referring. The literal goals of all speech acts are to affect the 
bearer's propositional attitudes in a particular way. Intuitively, the point of referring is 
to let the hearer know what is being talked about. The literal goal of the referring act 
must be, therefore, to make the hearer believe that it is mutually believed by all participants 
that a noun phrase is being used as a referring expression, and that ~identification" of a 
particular object is required. 
Rules for identification. What counts as "proper identification" changes from dis- 
course to discourse. For example, in "Replace this 300-ohm-resistor," the hearer is asked 
to "identify" the referent in the sense of locating it in his visual field. But in "Tell me 
what other plays were written by the author of Hamlet," visual identification is clearly not 
required, although the hearer is still expected to identify the author of Hamlet in another 
way. If the point of the referring act is the establishment of mutual agreement as to which 
object is being talked about, then a necessary condition for successful referring is that the 
hearer understand the ground rules for establishing such mutual agreement. These ground 
rules, which change from discourse to discourse, should be arrived at by the analysis of 
what we call the pragmatic notion of referent identification. 
Identification goals. Understanding the ground rules for referent identification is not 
the same as following these rules. While the literal goal of a referring act is that the hearer 
recognize the speaker's intentions that the hearer identify an object in a particular way, the 
condition of satisfaction of the referring act is that the hearer actually identify the referent 
166 
as required. Under typical circumstances, understanding the utterance "Replace the 300- 
ohm resistor" entails understanding that visual identification of the resistor is required. 
Another question entirely is whether actual identification eventually takes place. Let us 
call the goal that actual identification takes place as required the identification goal. 
To sum up, we have defined the literal goal and the conditions of satisfaction of refer- 
ring in terms of what the hearer is supposed to believe and do respectively. The literal goal 
is divided into two parts: first, making the hearer believe that identification of a particular 
object is required, and second, making him realize what kind of identification is appropri- 
ate. The referring act is satisfied when the hearer successfully follows the rules for correct 
identification. 
3 A Model of Referent Identification 
How can literal and identification goals be represented in a model of referring? We need 
two concepts, individuating sets and identification constraints. 
Individuating sets. Any model of referring must include representations of objects in 
the agent's model of the world. Such representations must be grouped into individuating 
sets. An individuating set S of an agent A is a maximal set of terms, all believed by A 
to denote the same object. The terms that constitute an individuating set can be either 
perceptual or descriptive. Perceptual terms are obtained by perceptual acts (e.g. looking 
at an object), while descriptive terms are obtained through the use of referring expressions 
in discourse 3 
A speaker intends to invoke or activate an individuating set when he intends a particular 
individuating set to be used in the interpretation of the current utterance. The notion of 
an individuating set being invoked or activated is closely related to the idea of an item 
being in focus during a discourse segment \[6,7\]. One can imagine a dynamic stack of active 
individuating sets representing the objects under discussion. 
Do we really need individuating sets? The answer is yes, for two important reasons. 
First, individuating sets provide elegant solutions for several problems that are raised 
by the Referential/Attributive distinction \[10,11,12\]. Second, as we have seen, a major 
problem for a referring model is specifying the conditions under which a hearer can be said 
to have identified the intended referent. Some authors have required that for identification 
to take place, the agent must possess a standard name or a rigid designator that denotes 
the referent. But very few objects are endowed with standard names, and it can be easily 
shown that a rigid designator is neither sufficient nor necessary for successful referent 
identification \[12\]. Moreover, requiring agents to know standard names or rigid designators 
for individuals that they refer to makes some undesirably strong predictions about what 
a speaker must know in order to refer to something \[2\]. Using individuating sets we can 
solve these problems. 
3For a more detailed discussion of individuating sets and their terms see \[3,12\]. 
167 
Identification constraints As noted earlier, "identification" should be interpreted prag- 
matically. Referent identification does not mean knowing who (or what) the referent is, 
but rather knowing who or what is being talked about. In general, the requirements for 
referent identification can be characterized in terms of constraints that the speaker places 
on the activated individuating set. I call these constraints identification constraints. 
Let S be the activated individuating set. The following examples illustrate different 
identification constraints on S: 
Example 1 Take this chair to my office. 
In Example 1, the hearer should "identify" the chair in the sense of locating it in his 
visual field. We can express this requirement as a constraint on S that it contain a new 
perceptual term. 
Example 2 Do you remember the brown desk I used to have in my office? 
In Example 2, the identification constraint is that the S should contain an old perceptual 
term, i.e. "identification" consists of connecting a definite description with an image in 
memory. 
Example 3 A friend of mine has just won $10,000 in a sweepstakes, but the lucky bastard 
will probably gamble it all away. 
Identification constraint: that S activated by the description "The lucky bastard" be 
augmented to include a term that has already been introduced into the discourse. "Iden- 
tification" here is simply making an anaphoric connection. 
Example 4 My sister has just got married. The lucky man met her only three weeks ago. 
Identification constraint: the S should contain the description "the husband of the speaker's 
sister". Note the difference between this case and Example 3: the description "my sister's 
husband" was never mentioned, and had to be deduced by the hearer. The deduction, of 
course, is a necessary condition for successful identification. 
Example 5 The man whose fingerprints these are, whoever he is, must be insane. 
Assume that the context of Example 5 is as follows: the speaker is investigating the horrible 
murder of Smith, and he has just found clear fingerprints on what he believes to be the 
murder weapon. The speaker, of course, wishes to assert that whoever murdered poor 
Smith in such a terrible way must be insane. Hence the identification constraint is that 
the S should contain the description "Smith's murderer". This example illustrates why 
we insist that identification as the goal of the referring act is a pragmatic, rather than 
an epistemological concept. Neither speaker, nor hearer in this case have any idea who 
murdered Smith, and thus, they cannot identify him in any epistemological sense of the 
term. But from a pragmatic point of view, there is a clear dichotomy: if the hearer makes 
the connection between "The man whose fingerprints these are," and "Smith's murderer," 
he has identified who the speaker is talking about. Otherwise, he has not. 
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Example 6 I met an old friend of mine yesterday. 
This is the case of the null set of identification constraints. S contains a single term, and 
this is sufficient for pragmatic identification. 
These examples show that the requirements for referent identification can be very 
diverse indeed. They all can be represented, however, as constraints on relations among 
individuating sets. 
The referring act. Armed with the concepts of individuating sets and identification 
constraints, we can characterize the act of referring as an act of conveying an ordered pair: 
an individuating set (which becomes the active one), and a set of identification constraints. 
The literal goal of the referring act is that it is mutually known by all participants which 
individuating set is active, and what the identification constraints are. The referring act 
is satisfied if the hearer is able to manipulate the active individuating set in such a way 
that all identification constraints are met. 
Acknowledgements 
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DCR-8407238. 
I am grateful to Doug Appelt for comments on earlier drafts, and for lots of stimulating 
discussions on the problem of constructing a computational model of referring. 
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