What does it mean 'to reference' and what are the requirements of 'coreferentiality' in the context of descriptive grammar?

Question

I would like to understand exactly what is meant in a grammar discussion when someone uses the word "coreferential". I understand it to mean that two or more constituents (e.g. a noun and a noun phrase) must reference the same entity, but I'm not really sure what is required for a constituent to be considered a reference, as distinct from a description or an ascription.

Consider:

Jane Doe, soprano in the church choir, had a bad cold.

Jane Doe, a soprano in the church choir, had a bad cold.

Jane Doe, best soprano in the church choir, had a bad cold.

Jane Doe, the best soprano in the church choir, had a bad cold.

Are all of the bolded phrases coreferential with "Jane Doe"? Only two of them, the ones with the article, can clearly stand as the grammatical subject of the verb phrase in that sentence:

*soprano in the church choir had a bad cold.

*best soprano in the church choir had a bad cold. (marginal?)

a soprano in the church choir had a bad cold.

the best soprano in the church choir had a bad cold.

And of those two, only the latter, the one with the definite article, seems (to me) to yield meaning equivalent to the following:

Jane Doe had a bad cold.

So, to be "coreferential", does the noun phrase have to point directly to the preceding noun, to it uniquely, and be able to stand in its place in the sentence and yield equivalent meaning when so standing, or does it merely have to be predicable of the preceding noun?

Answer 1

I'm not sure that we can expect everyone to use those terms in exactly the same way — especially if you're asking about people discussing English grammar online, who are not always known for using modern linguistic terms precisely and accurately — but for what it's worth, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) characterizes examples like yours as "ascriptive", and hence as non-referential. This is true even of your example with "the best soprano in the church choir", where the same phrase could be used to uniquely refer to Jane Doe, but in this case is merely ascribing a characteristic to her.

CGEL gives a few examples in chapter 15 § 5.2 (b), pages 1356–8, such as this one:

Kim Jones, a quite outstanding student, won a scholarship to MIT.

where it marks the phrase "a quite outstanding student" as ascriptive, comparing it to the identical phrase in a sentence like this one:

Kim Jones was a quite outstanding student.

(and in fact, in discussing another example it even mentions the ascriptive NP supplement's "predicand").

Admittedly, in the specific passage about ascriptive supplements, CGEL doesn't explicitly use the term "non-referential", nor does it give any examples with the definite article; however, the section about ascriptive noun phrases in general (chapter 5, § 8.3 (a), page 402) does both of those things, so I don't think it leaves any ambiguity about this.