Chair: Joulia Smortchkova
Abstract
Two ideas characterize many discussions of discourse files or discourse referents. One is that they are only temporary, serving as mental proxies for individuals only across some segment of discourse. Dissociations observed in many forms of amnesia are consistent with the idea that distinct circuits support indexing of individual representations within the current context vs. long-term. Neighboring regions of the inferior parietal cortex show fMRI responses during both visual working memory tasks and language comprehension tasks, and might support a common structured representation of the current scene or situation, to which individual object representations are temporarily indexed. Solving the different problems of long-term indexing requires different regions, including the hippocampus. The second idea is that discourse referents are in some way not actually referential, and that this explains certain linguistic patterns observed with common nouns, as well as their use in discussing hypothetical or fictional objects. I will dispute this second idea. Many classic puzzles of common noun reference disappear if nouns are taken to function as nonsingular names, rather than predicates (Geach, 1962). And the theory of instance-of-kind conceptual structure (Prasada 2016, in press) suggests that an instance-of-kind concept affords reference to the (potentially infinite) instances of a kind, independent of physical acquaintance with them, or whether they are hypothetical vs. actual. With such a non-predicative theory of noun meaning, we can therefore adopt a view where the way in which individual representations are indexed differs from the current context to long-term knowledge, but where the logic of reference is the same throughout.
