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$uccessful reference "does not depend upon ihe truth of the description contained in the refening expression"
(Lyons, 1977: 161). lt rather depends "on the hearefs identifying, for the purpose 0f understanding the cunent
linguistic message, fhe speaker"s interded refererrt, on the basis of the refening expression used" (Brown & Yule,
1983: 205; emphasis added). Example (context: restaurant, waitertalking to his replacement):
The ham sandnictt is sitting attable 20.
He is sitting attable 20.
(ln either case, the hearefs knowledge of the specific relation between the 'ham sandwich' and the 'customer at
table 20' is assumed. We may, of course, inferthat reference depends on the decoders'regesentations.)
The following example quoted by Brown & Yule (1983: 214) is illustrative of the way in which the nature of
gedicatian and the cvnversatianal context as well as the co4ert influence the decoder's (i.e., the hearefs or
readefs) representations of discourse entities. (Discuss the words in italics in terms of conecUsuccessful
reference)
Turbaned ladies hobbled towards the cathedral, scuffing the dust with feet too splayed and calloused to
admit the wearing of shoes. Their cottons were painted with leaves and lions and portraits of military
dictators. They hauled themselves into the teak pews ... lSix interuening paragraphs describe others
aniving at the cathedral and the beginning of the service./
At the Credo, the ladies sighed, heaved theirthighs and got to their feet. Leffers,lions, /eayres and military
dictators rustled and recomposed themselves.
(Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Anidah, Picador, 1982:1415)
4. Reference and Fictionalrty (Og[!gnA!- and very interesting! Particularly if you like literature...)
The queslion of what - if anything - literary works refer to has repeatedly been asked ever since antiquity (at this
point Plato and Arislotle would deserve special attention). Two extreme answers can be suggested by the
following examples: (a) in the sixth century B.C. the Athenian legislator Solon complained of the many lies told by
poets; (b) in his Apology for Poetry (1598), Sidney answers the accusation that poets are liars by arguing: "Now,
for the poet, he nothing affirms, and so therefore never lieth I ... / And therefore, though he recount things not true,
yet because he telleth them not fortrue, he lieth not ..."
It is not hald to demonstrate that literary fidion and lying are essentially different. Fiction is a significant
component of our everyday lives. We read comic slrips in magazines or read novels, we play games with our
children, watch TV, share jokes with our mates ... All these activities "involve mutual manipulation of fictional
conslructs according to central rules and conventions" (Hawthom, 1987, p. 95). They involve complex mediations
between fiction and reality and between our cultural reality and our object reality.
To realize that a literary work has no simplistic or mechanistic relationship to extra-textual reality "is not necesarily
to accept that the work contains no reference to the non-literary world" (Hawthom 1987, p.96). In order to
understand a work, any reader brings certain knowledge from the world. He brings the knowledge of a language,
and hence of a culture and of a part of the world. Central to literary reference is regesenfafion, which "never
works on a one-to-one basis: it is either partial, taking the part for the whole, or involves more complex processes
such as condensation and displacement which Freud traced in dream representation. lt is for this reason that a
single item in a piece of a representation may involve reference on a range of different levels. Where
representation is partial it has involved choice, and this is in part a commentary on the reality it selectively
imitated" (Hawthom, 1987, p. 97).
Three aspects are worth mentioning:

1) Literary works, in some way or another, do reflect extra'linguistic reality, but the linguistic signs which are used
are not meant to be refened directly to past or present contextual factors and cireumstances by the addressee,
that is, the reader. Fictional texts are situationally autonomous. The writer presupposes the reader to understand
the fictional text in its own intemal fields of reference, which creates fields of fictitious mnlrlrtual reference. The
reade/s understanding of the text, which is both hislorically and cutturally determined, depends on how he is able
to link the text-intemal mdel of the world to his own mdel of the world of the past (before now) and now (i.e.
when he is decoding the text)" (Werlich, 1983, p. 44). Certain tent form variants develop combinations of fad and
fiction that lead to such works as documentary novelslplays, historical navels/plays, ghast-wttten autobiographies.
(fhat is why Truman Capote's ln Cold B/ood has been called a faction, i.e., fact + fiction.)
2) Pragmatically speaking, during the reading experience the reader frequently oscillates between immersion in
the world of the work and consciousness of the text as text. We are, of cource, able to 'live' in the fiditious world

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Three aspects are worth mentioning:

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