Aspects of pragmatic referentiality

Chen (2009) attempts to explicate the notion of referentiality by examining three aspects, namely semantic, pragmatic and discourse thematic. We show that there are inadequacies in Chen's characterization of referentiality, in particular pragmatic referentiality, in that he seems to mostly have in mind definite expressions with definite reference when he sets up the criteria for the status of pragmatically referential expressions. We argue that none of his alleged three components of pragmatic referentiality holds, by demonstrating that for a linguistic expression to be pragmatically referential, the existence of the intended referent does not necessarily have to be presupposed; nor does it have to be uniquely identifiable; nor does it have to be made specific in the first place.