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Reviewing experimental semantics’ findings on reference in language and suggesting broader methods for clarification.
What fixes the reference of proper names and kind terms remains contested. Experimental semantics has revived debates between descriptivism and causal‐historical accounts and revealed complex patterns. This article reviews the field from early cross‐cultural findings to recent developments, including renewed attention to Jonah‐style cases, extensions from names to natural kind terms and other predicates, and methodological disputes like alleged “red herrings” and the new meaning hypothesis that prompted refinements. Looking ahead, we propose broadening targets (artifacts, social kinds, disease terms, etc.) and integrating richer methods (Socratic dialogue, online processing techniques like eye‐tracking, and corpus‐based analysis, etc.) to clarify referential mechanisms.
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Li et al. (2026) studied this question.
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