SEMANTICS

Unit 3: Reference & Sense

 Sense & Reference
• Sense - dealing with relationships inside the
language
• Reference - dealing with relationships
between the language & the world

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 Reference
By means of reference, a speaker indicates
which things in the world (including persons) are
being talked about.
E.g. My daughter is playing in the garden.
Practice (p. 27)
=> Reference is a relationship between parts of
a language and things outside the language.

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 Reference ...
• The same expression can, in some case, be
used to refer to different things => have
variable reference
Practice (p. 28)
• There are cases of expressions which in
normal everyday conversation never refer to
different things => have constant reference.
Practice (p. 28)

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 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 semantic relationships -
sameness of meaning
E.g. autumn = fall
• A word can have more than one sense.
E.g. bank
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 Rules
• Every expression that has meaning has sense,
but not every expression has reference.
E.g. - my daughter
- and
- possible

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 Mean - reference or sense
• In everyday conversation the words meaning,
means, meant, ... are sometimes used to
indicate reference and sometimes to indicate
sense.
Practice (p. 34)

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