Pronouns and procedures: Reference and beyond

•Pronouns encode procedures which function at a sub-personal level.•Pronominal procedures may contribute to expressive meaning and reference resolution.•Evidence from pronoun use supports the case against a unitary account of expressives.

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.