Reviewed by Svetlana Pashneva, Kursk State University

In eleven chapters Barbara Abbott explores the connection between words and the world, viewing reference as both a pragmatic phenomenon (taking into account a ‘human factor’) and a semantic one (abstracting away from speakers and message recipients). She focuses mostly on noun phrases (NPs), leaving out other linguistic forms considered to have reference. Each chapter begins with an overview and ends with a brief concluding section.

After an introduction, Ch.2, ‘The foundations’, presents the most important problems of reference, such as denotation, connotation, proper names, and propositions, discussing them with reference to the works of John Stuart Mill, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell. Ch. 3, ‘Subsequent developments’, takes a closer look at semantic scope and scope ambiguity, and touches on the semantics of quantificational NPs, sentence operators, and modal operators. A substantial part of the chapter focuses on possible worlds semantics and propositions, and presents sets of situations and structured combinations of intensions as alternatives to the concept of the proposition.

Ch. 4, ‘The proper treatment of quantification’, reviews the work of Paul Grice and Richard Montague. She gives a detailed description of Montague grammar and discusses a number of subsequent papers. In Ch. 5, ‘Proper names’, the author takes a closer look at descriptional, cluster, nondescriptional, metalinguistic, hidden indexical, and bite-the-bullet approaches to proper-name analysis, giving arguments for and against each of these approaches. Ch. 6, ‘Definite descriptions’, concerns whether definite descriptions are referential or quantificational expressions and whether referential interpretation is encoded semantically or conveyed pragmatically. The presented arguments are shown to be inconclusive.

Ch. 7, ‘Plurals and generics’, provides an overview of several important issues concerning plurality. The discussion includes the ways in which NPs with plural and mass head nouns can be interpreted depending on what is being predicated of their denotation, the ways predicates can apply to plural and mass NPs, and the problem of generic expressions. The author concludes that ‘this chapter must be considered only a basic introduction to this complex and interesting area’ (179). The first part of Ch. 8, ‘Indexicality and pronouns’, is devoted to the problem of indexicality. A then explores various interpretations of demonstratives and reviews two approaches to unifying them. The remainder of the chapter considers multiple uses of third person pronouns, and draws parallels between definite descriptions and pronouns.

Ch. 9, ‘Definiteness, strength, partitives, and referentiality’, investigates definiteness as one of the properties of NPs traditionally linked with referentiality and touches on related concepts such as the strong-weak distinction and partitive NPs. Ch. 10, ‘NPs in discourse’, centers on speakers’ use of NPs in conversational contexts. After providing an insight into pronouns, the problem of donkey pronouns, and dynamic semantics theories, she looks at the ways NPs are used by speakers. A review of a number of proposals for classifying NPs is followed by a brief description of the nature of discourse referents. In the final chapter, ‘Taking stock’, A compares the pragmatic and semantic conceptions of reference, and concludes that the area of noun-phrase reference remains full of unsolved problems, which she encourages readers ‘to go out and solve’. (280).

This book offers a highly readable presentation of major issues associated with reference. It is recommended for anyone interested in reference, semantics, philosophy of language, and cognitive studies.