Bishop – like Tennyson before her – was professedly ambivalent about, and sometimes antipathetic to, critics who sought ‘literary references’ in her poems. Tom Paulin takes Bishop’s lead when he writes that she ‘avoids recondite allusion’, and many recent critics have followed him. In this chapter, Bishop’s poetry is shown to be profoundly and variedly allusive. This chapter examines Bishop’s relation to the burgeoning knowledge industry of the 1960s and ’70s, and showcases the wide range of authors – including Luis de Camoes, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Robert Frost – to whom she alludes. This chapter considers in particular Bishop’s relationship to T. S. Eliot, as both an alluded-to source text and as a model of allusive practice. The chapter uses and then complicates Eliot’s distinction between allusions that confirm their sources’ effects, and those which are used in contexts that are ‘pointedly diverse’. John Hollander’s distinction between quotation, allusion and echo also frames the discussion of Bishop’s allusions in relation to loneliness, identity, posterity, and artifice.

At the start of the aletheistic tradition, in the Confessions Augustine pioneers a phenomenological approach to fixing the reference to God by means of a novel linguistic act, overheard praise, which mirrors and frames the beautiful forms of created things as themselves overheard linguistic acts; the existential choice of the reader is either to leave the speech as overheard or to enter the speech as addressee. Augustine interprets things as signs of their source, works out the objective order of love, and thematizes the paradox of God’s hidden presence and the creature’s beauty as a sign of the creator.

Reference to the hidden God can be fixed at any time by a deferred ostension: “That which causes the world to be is ‘God’.” This chapter articulates an account of ostension in general and deferred ostension in particular and articulates the merits of the aletheistic tradition for handling the problem of semantic drift that dogs contemporary appeals to ostension for fixing the reference to God.

To which ‘God’ do philosophers refer? In dialogue with Schellenberg and his insightful distinction between “ultimism” and “theism,” this chapter examines the limits of the natural horizon of inquiry into ultimacy. To think adequately about God the creator entails subverting the natural horizon of thought in order to understand the natural whole as a pointer or deferred ostension of its ultimate source.

Continuing the aletheistic tradition, Anselm’s most innovative writing, the Proslogion, adopts the form of Augustine’s Confessions, namely an overheard address to God, but he makes progress on the question of divine reference by deploying, in dialogue with the point of view of the atheist, a linguistic deferred ostension of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought. One and the same formula picks God out, establishes his reality, and guides our continued reflection.

Within the aletheistic tradition, Aquinas thinks creation, as a linguistic act, involves the theme of interpersonal manifestation. He is therefore able to overcome the apparent artificiality of Anselm’s linguistic ostension by setting the deferred ostension back into both the structure of created being and the natural longing for happiness.

This chapter discusses what it means for a word to have meaning. Starting with the classical traditions in the West and the East about the nature of meaning, the connections between the word and the object it refers to (reference), and a set of inherent and defining properties which determines the referent (sense). It then moves on to the modern analysis of types of meaning, and introduces the way linguists characterize word meanings through semantic analysis. Major lexical relations, including hyponymy/hypernymy, antonymy, synonymy, polysemy, homonymy and homophony, are discussed. This chapter also introduces the notion of collocation.

Referentiality is a core property of language that allows us to refer to entities or events. While evidence that captive apes communicate referentially by pointing is well-established, evidence in the wild remains scarce. The chapter suggests that the near absence of referential gesturing in wild apes may result in part from an anthropogenic bias and overabundance of caution in determining what constitutes reference for apes. A framework is presented to explore potentially referential gestures more generously – considering gestures whose form resembles the physical form, direction, or target of the recipient’s desired behavioural reaction. The chapter applies the framework to a gestural dataset from a chimpanzee community in which four possible cases of pointing were previously detected (<0.001 per cent) and found that ~18 per cent of gestures contained potential directional information. Taking a broader perspective when examining referential information in chimpanzee gestural communication may help us get to the point of ape reference.

This chapter problematizes the relationship between linguistic competence and communicative competence, as proposed by Chomsky (1965) and disputed by Hymes (1966), respectively. The contention is that these two types of competence are not in competition but should be regarded as a symbiosis. Current research demonstrates that there is much value in analyzing how linguistic and communicative competence work together. Our emphasis in this chapter is on pragmatic universals and the way languages may express them differently, thereby creating difficulty for second language (L2) learners. Within the area of interpersonal rhetoric, speech acts and (scalar) implicature are examined with a view of highlighting the amalgamation of grammar and communication in learning to compute and produce them. In tackling definiteness and specificity in the L2, we discuss the ways adults learn to refer to objects known or unknown to speaker or hearer. Deixis, or calculating reference based on the here and now, is a relatively underresearched area of pragmatic competence. At the syntax-discourse interface, we examine the acquisition of information structure, or topic and focus marking. The chapter finishes with a call for extending the research enquiry to all context-dependent aspects of meaning encoding and decoding.

A singularity condition is elaborated. It is discussed how perception can anchor or ground singular judgments. Without a link to perception, there would not be any knowledge of individual objects, since mere concepts cannot secure reference. This fact is also reflected in language. For ‘This F’ in a singular judgment ‘This F is G’ about the perceived scene cannot be divorced from an intuition of that scene. The use of demonstratives like “This” and “That” for direct reference are supplemented with non-conceptual content that comes from outer intuition, with in-built spatial orientation. By way of intuition and attention, there is mental demonstration of particulars, which may or may not be accompanied by overt demonstrations as well, like pointing gestures. Thus, the perceived scene is contained within a demonstrative space, as outlined by all possible embodied orientations of the perceiver in some fixed location or other. Intuition cuts in a perspectival manner from such a demonstrative space, and attention cuts even more finely.

The study of individuals with hippocampal damage and amnesia provides a compelling opportunity to directly test the role of declarative memory to communication and language. Over the past two decades, we have documented disruptions in discourse and conversation as well as in more basic aspects of language in individuals with hippocampal amnesia including at the word, phrase, and sentence level across offline and online language processing tasks. This work highlights the critical contribution of hippocampal-dependent memory to language and communication and suggests that hippocampal damage or dysfunction is a risk factor for a range of language and communicative disruptions even in the absence of frank disorders of amnesia or aphasia. This work also raises questions about the reality and utility of the historical distinction between communication and language in defining cognitive-communication disorders as individuals with isolated memory impairments show deficits that cut across both communication and language.

This chapter examines William of Ockham’s theory of mental speech, focusing on aspects that have been claimed to give rise to the possibility of pernicious ambiguity. Against these claims, which center on the varieties of reference allowed by supposition theory, we argue that Ockham’s theory remains coherent despite marginal instances of ambiguity. We review two types of suppositional ambiguity: Type 1, in which referring terms can be interpreted as suppositing personally, materially, or simply; and Type 2, in which supposition is personal but can vary in tense or modality. Type 1 ambiguity is ruled out, except in extreme cases, by the fact that “changing” the supposition of a term requires a conscious, reflexive act of the speaker; Type 2 ambiguity, while more of a live possibility, is generally either absent or harmless. In neither case does ambiguity seriously compromise the function of mental speech as a vehicle of human cognition.