Referential indeterminacy

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In linguistics, referential indeterminacy is a situation in which different people vary in naming objects. For example, William Labov studied this effect using illustrations of different drinking vessels to see what people would label as "cups" and what people would label as "mugs".

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves analysing language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī.

William Labov is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics. He is a professor emeritus in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania, and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology. He retired at the end of spring 2014.

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