Sense and reference

Reference and
meaning
Two ways of talking about the meaning of words and other
expressions:
Sense Reference
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
(wordsexpressions) 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 (almostnearly)fell over.
- school école
sidewalk (A.E)------- pavement (B.E)

Also more than one expressionsentence 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 .

Sense and reference

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