Exophoric Reference

4 Key excerpts on "Exophoric Reference"

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  Cohesion in English

  • M.A.K. Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  run have referential meaning in that they are names for some thing: object, class of objects, process and the like. An exophoric item, however, is one which does not name anything; it signals that reference must be made to the context of situation. Both exophoric and endophoric reference embody an instruction to retrieve from elsewhere the information necessary for interpreting the passage in question; and taken in isolation a reference item is simply neutral in this respect – if we hear a fragment of conversation such as

  [2:3] That must have cost a lot of money.

  we have no means of knowing whether the that is anaphoric or exophoric. The previous speaker might have said, ‘I’ve just been on holiday in Tahiti’, or the participants might be looking at their host’s collection of antique silver; and if both these conditions hold good, the interpretation will remain doubtful. Ambiguous situations of this kind do in fact quite often arise.

  What is essential to every instance of reference whether endophoric (textual) or exophoric (situational) is that there is a presupposition that must be satisfied; the thing referred to has to be identifiable somehow. One of the features that distinguish different REGISTERS is the relative amount of Exophoric Reference that they typically display. If the situation is one of ‘language-in-action’, with the language playing a relatively small and subordinate role in the total event, the text is likely to contain a high proportion of instances of Exophoric Reference. Hence, as Jean Ure has demonstrated in her studies of different registers, it is often difficult to interpret a text of this kind if one only hears it and has no visual record available.

  It is important to make this point, and to emphasize that the special flavour of language-in-action is not a sign that it is ungrammatical, simplified, or incomplete. It is often highly complex, although we have no very convincing measures of structural complexity; and if it appears ungrammatical or incomplete this is largely due to the preponderance of reference items used exophorically, which seem incomplete because their presuppositions are unresolved. A high degree of Exophoric Reference is one characteristic of the language of the children’s peer group. When children interact with each other, especially young children, they do so through constant reference to things; and since the things which serve as reference points are present in the immediate environment they are typically referred to exophorically. In the same way the adult is expected to pick up the necessary clues from the context of situation, as in this exchange between one of the present authors and her three-year-old son:

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  A Grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako

  • Åshild Næss, Even Hovdhaugen(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 Deictics 5.1. Introduction Deictics are words or morphemes which change their reference according to the context in which they are uttered. Deixis may be of several types: personal deixis, which is typically expressed by the forms we call pronouns ( I refers to a different person when “I” say it than when “you” say it), spatial deixis (‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’, ‘there’ etc.), or temporal deixis (‘now’, ‘then’, ‘to-day’).The notion of temporal deixis is generally less central to the organiza-tion of grammar than the other two (Anderson and Keenan 1985: 295–296) and will not be dealt with in any detail in this chapter, except insofar as forms with basic spatial-deictic reference can be used with a temporal deictic func-tion; here we will focus on personal and spatial deixis. Temporal-deictic forms are typically adverbs; they are treated in 11.4. These two basic forms of deixis, personal and spatial, overlap to some ex-tent, not just in Vaeakau-Taumako, but in languages in general; spatial-deictic forms typically make reference to location or movement relative to the speech-act event, and therefore ultimately to the speech-act participants (Anderson and Keenan 1985: 277). Deictic forms typically have two related functions. The first is referring di-rectly to aspects of the extralinguistic speech situation, so-called Exophoric Reference (the term “deixis” in itself strictly speaking refers to such Exophoric Reference, “pointing out” of the act of speaking towards features in the physi-cal world). The phrase That book when used to point out a book which is visi-ble to both participants in the speech-situation has Exophoric Reference. The second function of deictic forms is to refer to previously or subse-quently occurring items of discourse, so-called endophoric reference. In a phrase like That book I was telling you about before , That book has endo-phoric reference.

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  Pragmatics and the English Language

  • Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER

  2

  Referential Pragmatics

  2.1 Introduction

  Leech (1983:11) briefly mentions the label for the area that we will discuss in this chapter, namely, referential pragmatics. He defines it as “the assignment of reference to referential expressions in a given utterance” (ibid.). The notion of reference briefly popped up in the previous chapter. Let us explore the area through an example. Consider this statement:

  [2.1] The Palgrave editor visited me in my office today.

  The Palgrave editor is who exactly? There are several such editors who work for the publisher Palgrave, and there have been many such editors – which one are we talking about? This is a referring expression directing the reader to pick out a specific person from the context. Similarly, “my office” is directing the reader to pick out a particular place. Again, the reader will have to work out which office is being talked about. What of me and my? Clearly, they refer to the author of this statement, and it is up to the reader to work out who that author is. Similarly, today refers to the time period in which the author was writing, and we would need to work out when that is. All these expressions involve working out connections with context; they are referring expressions. In a very general sense, all expressions used in relation to something out there in the world – a world which includes the discourses we create – can be said to involve reference to something. Reference, broadly conceived, is a topic of special interest in semantics and philosophy. This kind of very general relation is not our focus here (for more on this, see Frege’s classic [1892] 1952 work on sense and reference). We are interested in expressions, such as those in our example, whose meaning will seem inadequate without the interpreter having made a connection with a specific part of a specific context – a referent. The fact that those expressions involve a referent, an entity to which they refer, means that all referring expressions presuppose the existence of an entity. We will use the term referring

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  Corpus Pragmatics

  A Handbook

  • Karin Aijmer, Christoph Rühlemann(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Altogether seven subtypes can be distinguished. They are presented and illustrated in (18)–(24). Exophoric (18) Time deictic: Mum had a perm this morning (NC: KBS-N1) (19) Place deictic: Teachers are very unfair in this school in n it (NC: KNV-N2) (20) Person deictic: What about this man here with a great big bass drum? (BNC-C: KD0 11300) Endophoric (21) Anaphoric: the picture that comes on is Newlands Park you know. At the moment this is a dreadful area (NC: KBY-N1) (22) Cataphoric: I must just tell you this, Laura did make me laugh (NC: KBG-N2) 340 Christoph Rühlemann and Matthew Brook O’Donnell Non-phoric (23) Recognitional: you know this young girl that was killed along Benji Avenue with her mother? (NC: KCP-N1) (24) Introductory this: I had this octopus once in Germany and it, we ’d gone out for a meal and I was gonna have steak and mushrooms and (NC: KBD-N1) Given that the reader is already familiar with temporal, locational, and personal deixis and anaphoric and cataphoric reference, we will only characterize the non-phoric uses of this in more detail. Both uses have in common that the reference through this “is present neither in the text nor in the situation but only in the speaker ’s mind” (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 61). In this respect, this in (23) and (24) can be seen as “non- phoric” (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 61; Strauss 2002). The fact that this attaches to a referent which is present “only in the speaker ’s mind” entails that reference through recognitional and introductory this is “first-mention,” or discourse-new, reference. The differences are twofold. First, the reference of this young girl in (23) is “recognitional” in the sense that it is “used to activate shared knowledge” (Diessel 1999: 105): the speaker uses this to call into the consciousness of the hearer a referent both participants have access to.

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