examples of expressions.
used by speakers to refer to 'given' entities.
Pronouns are typically uttered with low pitch in spoken discourse and, as such, are types of referring expressions which, in Chafe's terms (1976), are phonologically and lexically 'attenuated'. Because of their lack of 'content', they have become the crucial test-case items for any theory of reference. After all, to what does the expression it refer, in isolation? The fact that there is no reasonable answer to this question has led many linguists to suggest that a pronominal such as it is not actually a referring expression, but can only be usedco-referentially, that is, within a text which also includes a full nominal expression.