+ Models LINGUA-2343; No. of Pages 14 Please cite this article in press as: Scott, K., Pronouns and procedures: Reference and beyond. Lingua (2015), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.07.005 Pronouns and procedures: Reference and beyond Kate Scott * Department of Linguistics and Languages, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE, United Kingdom Received 5 March 2015; accepted 16 July 2015 Abstract In this paper I bring together discussion of two types of meaning that have informed and driven Blakemore’s work: procedural meaning and expressive meaning, and I consider how application of Blakemore’s influential ideas can further our understanding of pronouns in English. I revisit existing procedural accounts of pronouns, and explore the nature of the procedures that they propose. I argue that if we treat procedural meaning as operating at a sub-personal level, then we gain insight not only into how pronouns function in communication, but also into the nature of procedural meaning itself. The cognitive processes triggered by pronouns reveal the speaker’s sub-personal categorization of the intended referents. Often this will guide the hearer in reference resolution, but in certain cases the procedures contribute to other inferential processes. I focus on examples where the pronouns lead to expressive effects, and consider what this tells us, more generally, about the nature of pronouns, procedures and expressive meaning. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Reference; Pronoun; Expressives; Procedural meaning; Relevance theory 1. Introduction It is generally acknowledged that when a speaker utters a pronoun in English, the content communicated by use of the pronoun will vary from context to context, although a common core of linguistic meaning will remain constant across these different uses. Consider the example in (1): (1) I gave it to him. When spoken by Diane in one particular discourse context, the utterance in (1) might be taken to express the proposition in (2). However, when spoken by Becci in a different context, it might express the proposition in (3). (2) Diane gave the glass to Billy. (3) Becci gave the book to Tim. In some sense Diane and Becci have said the same thing. They have, after all, uttered the same words in the same order. However, the propositions that they have expressed are different and have different truth conditions. Kaplan explained www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Lingua xxx (2015) xxx--xxx * Tel.: +44 208 417 2391. E-mail address: kate.scott@kingston.ac.uk. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.07.005 0024-3841/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.