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<Paper uid="T87-1034">
  <Title>Goals of Referring Acts</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="165" end_page="166" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Literal and Identification Goals
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The literal goal of referring. The literal goals of all speech acts are to affect the bearer's propositional attitudes in a particular way. Intuitively, the point of referring is to let the hearer know what is being talked about. The literal goal of the referring act must be, therefore, to make the hearer believe that it is mutually believed by all participants that a noun phrase is being used as a referring expression, and that ~identification&amp;quot; of a particular object is required.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Rules for identification. What counts as &amp;quot;proper identification&amp;quot; changes from discourse to discourse. For example, in &amp;quot;Replace this 300-ohm-resistor,&amp;quot; the hearer is asked to &amp;quot;identify&amp;quot; the referent in the sense of locating it in his visual field. But in &amp;quot;Tell me what other plays were written by the author of Hamlet,&amp;quot; visual identification is clearly not required, although the hearer is still expected to identify the author of Hamlet in another way. If the point of the referring act is the establishment of mutual agreement as to which object is being talked about, then a necessary condition for successful referring is that the hearer understand the ground rules for establishing such mutual agreement. These ground rules, which change from discourse to discourse, should be arrived at by the analysis of what we call the pragmatic notion of referent identification.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Identification goals. Understanding the ground rules for referent identification is not the same as following these rules. While the literal goal of a referring act is that the hearer recognize the speaker's intentions that the hearer identify an object in a particular way, the condition of satisfaction of the referring act is that the hearer actually identify the referent  as required. Under typical circumstances, understanding the utterance &amp;quot;Replace the 300ohm resistor&amp;quot; entails understanding that visual identification of the resistor is required. Another question entirely is whether actual identification eventually takes place. Let us call the goal that actual identification takes place as required the identification goal.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> To sum up, we have defined the literal goal and the conditions of satisfaction of referring in terms of what the hearer is supposed to believe and do respectively. The literal goal is divided into two parts: first, making the hearer believe that identification of a particular object is required, and second, making him realize what kind of identification is appropriate. The referring act is satisfied when the hearer successfully follows the rules for correct identification.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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