Bismillah: In the name of Allah Most Merciful Most Gracious

Linguistics: Semantics
Handout# 2: Instructor: Dr. Juma Njadat-Al-Sa’eed
Chapter 3: Reference and Sense

Revision of Previous terms:

o A sentence can be true or false
o An utterance is tied to a particular time and place
o A sentence is not tied to a particular time or place.
o An utterance can be true or false.
Reference & Sense are two quite distinct ways of talking about the meaning of
words and other expressions:
Sense: dealing with relationships inside the language
Reference: we deal with relationships between language and the world.
Definition:
Reference: by means of reference a speaker indicates which things in the world
(including persons) are being talked about. e.g.
"My son is in the beech tree." (My son: identifies a person) (the beech tree identifies
thing)
 Reference is a relationship between parts of a language and things outside the
language (in the world).
 The same expression can, in some cases, be used to refer to different things.
 Many expressions in a language can have variable reference.
 In fact, there is very little constancy of reference in language.
 In everyday discourse almost all of the fixing of reference comes from the
context in which expressions are used.
 Two different expressions can have the same referent: e.g. the Morning Star
& the Evening Star both of which normally refer to the planet Venus. Further
examples: (Britain in1982: the Prime Minister and the Leader of the
Conservative party have the same referent) & (in a situation where John is
standing alone in the corner, John can have the same referent as the person in
the corner

Sense: the sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships
with other expressions in the language.
 The first of the relationships is sameness of meaning
 The term sense is used both for single words & for longer expressions
such as phrases and sentences.
 Examples of single words having similar sense: (almost &nearly
,likely & probable) vs. (Wednesday &Thursday)
 Examples for longer expressions: Rupert to k off his jacket vs. Rupert
took his jacket off.
 In some cases, the same word can have more than one sense:
e.g. the word bank p. 29
 One sentence can have different senses too: Example1: The
chicken is ready to eat: two different senses are possible.
Example2: He greeted the girl with a smile.

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 Sense vs. Reference
The referent of an expression is often a thing or a
person in the world; whereas the sense of an expression
is not a thing at all
In fact it is difficult to say what sort of entity the sense
of expression is.
It is much easier to say whether or not two expressions
have the same sense.
The sense of an expression is an abstraction, but it is
helpful to note that it is an abstraction that cab
entertained in the mind of a language user.
When a person understands fully what is said to him, it
is reasonable to say that he grasps the sense of the
expressions he hears.
Rule: Every expression that has meaning has sense,
but not every expression has reference: Examples
include words such as, almost/probable, and/if
Just as there is something complete about the whole
sentence, as opposed to a smaller expression such as a
phrase or a single word, there is something
semantically complete about a proposition, as opposed
to the sense of a phrase or single word. One might say
roughly that a proposition corresponds to a complete
independent thought.
To the extent that perfect translation between languages
is possible (and this is a very debatable point: ask for
further investigation of this point), the same sense can
be said to belong to expressions in different languages.

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