Reference and

meaningTwo ways of talking about the meaning of words and other

expressions:

Reference Sense We deal with relationships between

language and world.

We deal with relationships

inside the language.

The world

X1 x2

language

The world

y

X

language

•Both reference and sense are different but related aspects of semantics

Reference- By means of reference a speaker indicates which thing or people

are being talked about .

- Reference is something haring physical existence.

Example:

My son is in the beech tree.

Referent: person referent: things

Note:

Referent of a part of language: things or people exist in the

world even something or someone that not exist but we believe

they are available.

So we have 2 things:

*the English expression (part of language)

*thing \ person (part of the world)

Can a part of language (word\ expression) have more than one

referent??

Some other expressions never

refer to different references

Example :

The moon"“

Have a constant reference

Some expressions in a

language can have variable

references

Example :

Orange

Fruit color

Note :

There is very little constancy of reference in language , almost all of

the fixing of references comes from the context and according to

the circumstances "time , place ..etc " in which expressions are

used .

Example :

the president of USA in 1997 was George w Bush

in 2006 was Bill Clinton

in 2009 was Obama.

Two different expressions can have the same referent.

Example :

the morning star & the evening star (planet venus)

Mohamed Nagib & the 1st

president .

SENSE

- The sense of a part of language

(words\expressions) is its place in a system of semantic

relationships with other expression in the language.

- Sense is something which doesn't have any physical

existence.

- Sense deals with intra-linguistic relationships "semantic

relationships"

- One of the semantic relationships is "sameness of meaning in

words, phrases and sentences "

More than one word can have the same sense .

- same language I (almost\nearly)fell over.

- school école

sidewalk (A.E)------- pavement (B.E)

Also more than one expression\sentence can have the same sense :

Rupert took off his jacket = Rupert took his jacket off.

in some cases the same word can have more than one sense :

Example :

- I have an account at the bank of Scotland .

- we steered the raft to the other bank of river.

In some cases alike sentences have different sense :

Example :

- the chicken is ready to eat .

- the chicken is ready to be eaten.

- the chicken is ready to eat something.

The relationship between sense and reference

- the referent of an expression is often a thing or person

in the world .

- the sense of an expression is not a thing at all it is an

abstraction that can be entertained in the mind of a language user.

- it's difficult to say what sort of entity the sense of an expression

is .. it is useful to think of sense as that is a part of meaning of an

expression that is left over when reference is factored out .

- it's much easier to say whether or not two expressions have the

same sense .

rule :

every expression that have meaning have sense ,

but not every expression has reference

almost , probable , if and above don't refer to a

thing in the world but they all have a sence

circularity :

* there is something essential circular about the set

of definitions in a dictionary & defining the sense of

words and other expressions .

*not a bad thing

*often unavoidable >> ( e.g. cases of expressions that

have no referent " and " , etc. ) there is no way of

indicating the meaning of the expression exept with

the words

sence and proposition

there is something semantically complete about a proposition as

opposed to the sense of a phrase of single word .

one might say , roughly , that a proposition corresponds to a

complete independent thought .

_____________________________________________________

grammatically complete >> whole sentence >> smaller

expressions

e.g. a phrase or a

single word .

_____________________________________________________

semantically complete >> a proposition >> sense of a phrase oryy

a single word

_____________________________________________________

sense and different languages

can the same sense to belong to expressions in different

languages ??

to the extent that perfect translation between languages is

possible ( a very debatable point ) essentially the same sense can

be said to belong to expressions in different languages .

Ex:

the pyramid of Khufu is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids

in the Giza . it's the only one of the seven wonders of the Ancient

world to remain largely intact

the relationship between :

* sense and propositions >> direct >> similarity

* sense and utterance >> not so direct >> similarity

_______________________________________________________

- both referring and uttering are acts performed by particular

speaker on particular occasion .

- most utterances contain , or are accompanied by , one or more

acts of referring .

- an act of referring is the picking out of a particular referent by a

speaker on a course of a particular utterance

-- although the concept of reference is fundamentally

related to utterances , in the acts of reference only

actually happen in the course of utterances .

-- when talking about reference in connection with

sentences , or parts of sentences , we are imagining a

potential utterance of the sentence or expression in

question .

-- in every day conversation , the words ( meaning _ means

_mean _meant _etc ) are sometimes used to indicate

reference and som times to indicate sense .