Exophoric Reference
Exophoric reference is a linguistic term that describes a reference to something outside the text or conversation. It relies on the context in which the communication takes place, such as the physical environment or shared knowledge between the speaker and listener. This type of reference is common in everyday language and often requires the listener to infer the intended meaning based on the surrounding context.
6 Key excerpts on "Exophoric Reference"
eBook - ePub- M.A.K. Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...So the exophoric connections with the environment are connections made at the semantic level. This accounts for reference. Reference is a semantic relation linking an instance of language to its environment, and reference items are in principle exophoric. The basic meaning of him is ‘that man out there’. We can see this clearly in the first and second person forms me and you, which refer to the roles of speaker and addressee in the communication situation; and also in the demonstratives with their system of proximity, ‘near me’ (this) or ‘not near me’ (that), with sometimes a third term ‘not near either of us’ (yon), as in [7:5] Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look. Secondly, in any connected passage of discourse it will be necessary to refer back to something that has been mentioned already, making explicit the fact that there is identity of reference between the two. There is still, no doubt, an ultimate referent beyond the language, which defines the nature of the identity between the two instances. But the immediate referent of the second instance is the first instance; and it is this immediate referent, the previous mention, that now constitutes the relevant environment, not the extralinguistic referent. Probably, all languages adapt their reference items to this function, extending them from exophoric to endophoric use. (This formulation is not intended to imply that such a development has taken place in the known history of languages, but rather that it is a development that has probably taken place in the evolution of human language as a whole.) Thus in English nearly all reference items are also regularly endophoric. In those types of situation in which the perceptual environment is not part of the relevant social context, uses of language which are far removed from ‘language in action’, endophoric reference takes precedence over exophoric as a means of establishing identity...
eBook - ePub- Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...They discovered that exophoric referring expressions made up over half of the referring expressions in conversation, whereas they were almost non-existent in the written registers, news and academic prose. Those written registers were dominated by anaphoric nouns. In other words, people, not surprisingly, regularly refer to aspects of their immediate extralinguistic context in conversation, whereas in the written registers they refer to aspects of the (previous) text. They also looked at the average distance between the referring expression and the antecedent in the various registers (the distance was defined as the number of intervening noun phrases). Some large differences emerged. The averages are: conversation (4.5), academic prose (9.0) and news reportage (11.0). That referring expressions occur much closer to their antecedents in conversation can be partly explained by the fact that conversation is conducted online with all the mental processing pressures that implies – referring expressions with short distances to their antecedents are easier to understand. But this finding is also a consequence of the referring expression type. Exophoric referring expressions do not have intervening textual material: they refer directly to their referents. 2.5 Using and understanding referring expressions in interaction 2.5.1 Referring expressions and context The following is the beginning of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest ([1962] 2003: 1): [2.18] They’re out there. This is a creative way to begin a novel; it creates psychological prominence. We have the outline of a puzzle here, but not the pieces with which to complete it. We know that some group of people (they) are located in some space away from where the speaker/writer is (out there). The referring expressions begin to build the point of view of one particular character, the protagonist, who is incarcerated in a mental institution. It flags the kind of context that needs fleshing out...
eBook - ePub- Anne O'Keeffe, Brian Clancy, Svenja Adolphs(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Endophoric reference is concerned with anaphoric reference and cataphoric reference. Looking back at extract 4.2 again, we can determine from the text that the I in, for example, I will not open the window here, refers backwards, or anaphorically, within the text itself to Miss Bates and, similarly, we can determine that the him in just to thank him refers to Mr Knightley. Finally, in relation to cataphoric, or forward-pointing reference, we can determine from the text that will find in You will find some friends here points forward in the text to the group of people Mr Knightly will meet when he enters the room. 4.2 Deixis The main focus of this chapter, deixis, falls under the domain of Exophoric Reference. Derived from the Greek word for ‘pointing’ or ‘indicating’ (deiktikos ‘apt for pointing with the finger’), deixis enables interlocutors to refer to entities in context, thereby allowing them to identify people and things in relation to the space in which they are operating at the moment at which they are speaking. Table 4.1 has briefly introduced a number of items that encode deixis, for example, the first and second person pronouns I and you ; the demonstrative use of that ; adverbs of space such as there ; and other grammatical features such as tense markers. These items that encode deixis are commonly referred to as deictics (marked in bold in extract 4.3). (4.3) [ Context: Recording takes place in the home between intimates. Speakers are numbered according to their appearance in the extract.] <$1> well the various cross-channel ferries have been cancelled for today into tomorrow because of this storm <$2> oh right <$1> yeah (Spoken BNC2014: Text S263) The meaning of deictic items today and tomorrow can only be retrieved from the context of the situation...
eBook - ePubVygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind
Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind
- James V. Wertsch(Author)
- 1988(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
...In my brief account here of how children develop the ability to use language to operate on itself, I shall consider only three types of intralinguistic relationship. First, I would argue that intralinguistic indexical relationships play a role in this development. The mastery of the linguistic means required to create and maintain reference is important in this connection. Recall that since I am concerned here with the ability to create and maintain reference through linguistic means alone, this aspect of discourse referentiality contrasts with that based on extralinguistic indexical relationships. In M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan’s (1976) terminology, the contrast is one between endophoric and Exophoric Reference. With the emergence of the ability to represent and operate on intralinguistic indexical relationships, one sees the development of one way that language can serve as its own context. The referents are still nonlinguistic objects, but the existence and identity of the referents are created and maintained through speech. Table 2 represents the objects and relationships involved in this first type of intralinguistic relationship. The second type of relationship is another form of intralinguistic indexical relationship (that is, a relationship between sign tokens). Unlike the first type of relationship, where the referent was nonlinguistic, now the referent itself is linguistic. Thus both the referent and the referring expression concern actual discourse (sign tokens). Following Hickmann (1980a, 1985) and Silverstein (1976, 1985), I shall term this use of speech “metapragmatic.” Hickmann (1985) has noted that one of the metapragmatic uses of speech occurs “when speech refers to speech—for example, when a speaker uses speech in one situation in order to represent speech that was uttered in another situation” (p. 241)...
eBook - ePub- Betty J. Birner(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...We will then move to anaphora – the use of expressions that co-refer to situationally or textually evoked elements – distinguishing between deictic and anaphoric uses of demonstrative expressions and discussing the problem of pronoun resolution and its interacting syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects. Finally, we will discuss the much-cited distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions and evidence suggesting that this distinction is illusory. 4.1 Referring Expressions What is a referring expression? We could start by saying that it’s a linguistic expression that a speaker uses in order to enable an addressee to “pick out” something in the world. This is the sort of definition that is frequently given, but it already raises questions. What does it mean to pick something out? And what counts as the world? In the mentalist view, what is picked out is limited to entities in the discourse model, rather than anything in the “actual” world of concrete objects. And the question of what it means to pick out something brings up a morass of issues concerning what it is to know something’s identity, what constitutes a “thing” at all, and how we know when two things are the same. Clearly we will only be able to make a small dent in these issues here, but they are well worth keeping in mind as we talk about reference and referring expressions. Let us say that a referring expression is a linguistic form that the speaker uses with the intention that it correspond to some discourse entity and bring that discourse entity to mind for the addressee. Recall that in Chapter 1 we distinguished between the sense and reference of a referring expression, where its sense is its literal semantic meaning, and its reference is what the speaker intends to refer to, or pick out, through the use of that expression. Sense is invariant, while reference will be partly determined by contextual factors; and sense is semantic, while reference is pragmatic...
- Jan McAllister, James E. Miller(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Crucial to the interpretation of deictic words and phrases are the location of the speaker relative to some other entity, whether the entity is the speaker, the addressee or a third person, and the moment at which the speaker is speaking. Deictic items can be used to signal perceived proximity or remoteness with respect to time, the place of an entity in a narrative, social relations and the speaker's attitude. Reference has to do with the use of noun phrases/referring expressions to draw the attention of listeners or readers to some entity or entities. It is an act, whereas denotation has to do with the information carried by lexical items. Speakers and writers can refer to entities that are given, that is have already been mentioned or are prominent in the immediate context or in the culture shared by speaker or writer and the addressee. Reference may be to entities that are new, that is have not been mentioned or that cannot, in the judgment of the speaker, be (easily) picked up by the addressee. Given entities are specific; new entities may be specific or non-specific. Philosophers focus on whether referring expressions are correct but in ordinary language use many instances of referring are successful without being correct. The interpretation of both deictics and definite noun phrases may involve bridging. The addressee builds a bridge from an apparent deictic target or referent to the intended target or referent, making use of frames of information about some area of a given culture or world. Exercises using clinical resources 11.6. In Section 11.3.2 we noted that it can be challenging to process the ‘shifting deixis’ associated with direct speech in narrative. Consider the Recalling Sentences in Context subtest of the CELF-Preschool, and look at the items that include direct speech (i.e. words in inverted commas). In which items could shifting deixis be an issue? 11.7. The following resources involve the clinician asking questions of the client...
