Tishreen University

Faculty of Literature and Humanities

English Literature Department

The Referential Theory of Meaning

"Semantics"

Professor: Jalal Al-raee

Researcher: Majd Mando
Overview:
One definition of "Language" is a system of signs; nevertheless,
the signs that are certain kinds of marks and noises have
meanings, which we –as humans- understand without even
thinking about it. Hence, many theories were involved in
explaining such facts. However, not all of them managed to
give an adequate explanation, as in order for a philosophical
theory of meaning to be valid, it should explain what it is for a
string of marks and noises to be meaningful, as it should also
explain how do humans produce and grasp the meaning of
meaningful signs.

Meaning and Understanding:

We shall start our study by considering some examples that will
lead us to useful conclusions:
- Wryfhuisflmdjskelf utigjf (1)
- Today is a great day (2)
- Splash world man amazing fire kite (3)
All of the above examples are strings of signs. but they surely
differ from each other,(2) is a meaningful sentence , (1) and
(3) are gibberish , (3) differs from (1) by having individually
meaningful words that are not linked in a proper way to
make a sentence .Thus , in terms of studying meaning , our
semantic study of language starts with the following basic
"Data"
 Some strings of marks and noises are meaningful.
 Each meaningful sentence has parts which themselves
have meaning.
 Each meaningful sentence means something in particular.
 Competent speakers of a language are able to understand
and produce many of that language sentences almost
instantaneously.
 Some distinct expressions can have the same meaning
(i.e. synonyms)
 Single expressions can have more than one meaning (i.e.
polysemy).
All of the mentioned data above need to be explained.

The Referential Theory:

This theory adopts the idea that "linguistic expression have
the meaning they do because they stand for things in the
world around us, in this sense, words are like labels, they are
symbols that represent, name, denote or refer to items in
the world. Thus, this Referential Theory depends on "the
referent" in order to explain the existence of the significance
of all expressions, taking into consideration the conventional
relation between words and their referents. It also explains a
human being's understanding of sentences in terms of that
person knowing what the sentences component words refer
to.
However, it sounds natural as far as it goes, since naming or
reference is one of our most familiar ways of relating words
with our world. Yet, when examined, The Referential Theory
was faced with serious "objections".
Objection 1
There are words in language that refer to something that
simply does not exist, or in other words, they have no real
referent. Here are a couple of examples:
1. Sally loves unicorns
 2. I went into the office, but nobody was there.
3. Please, don't speak on my behalf
Secondly, we have the "infinite regress" pointed out by
Bradley 1930, which is a philosophical problem
concerning the nature of relations. As in this example:
Jane is greedy
While Jane refers to a person, greedy denotes something
abstract (a quality or characteristic), "is" still needs a
second abstract entity to stand for , let's say the relation
of "having" Jane bears the having relation of greed, thus,
again we need a third abstract entity to connect the new
"bears" relation to the original individual.

Objection 2
The Referential Theory claims that sentences are lists of
words or names, however, a mere list of names does not
say anything:
Fadi John Apple Sea

Objection 3
There are specific linguistic phenomena that seem to
show that there is more to meaning than reference:
Joodeh Abu khamis is Bassem Yakhor
When considering this example we realize that we have two
terms that share the same referent, but differ in meaning.
In conclusion, despite the failings of The Referential Theory of
explaining meaning, yet, we cannot neglect the importance of
reference, since it helps us introduce many concepts that will
be needed to assess the theories of meaning.
References:
Russell Bertrand (1905), On Denoting.