Sense, Reference and Denotation

● The sense of a lexeme may be defined as the general meaning or the concept
underlying the word. It is the idea/concept a word conjures in your mind. The notion of
sense can be made more explicit through contrast with the category of referent.

● A word’s referent is the physical object which it stands for on a specific occasion of
use. A word’s referent, then, is the particular thing, person, place, etc. which an
expression stands for on a particular occasion of use, and it changes each time the word
is applied to a different object or situation in the world

Example: The queen has fallen off the table.

(Context is a rowdy evening at Buckingham Palace in 2009, where things went a bit wild)

● the referent of the word queen is Her Majesty, Elizabeth II, and the referent of the word
table is a particular piece of English royal furniture.

But if I am talking not about Elizabeth II but about Queen Margrethe of Denmark, the
words queen and table have different referents: not Elizabeth II and the English piece of
furniture, but Margrethe and the Danish one. On each eof the occasions is uttered, there
is one and we one referent of each word

● A word’s sense does not change every time the word takes on a new referent.
Regardless of whether the referent of queen is Elizabeth II or Margrethe, its sense is
something like ‘female reigning monarch’. It is not to say, however, that ‘female reigning
monarch’ is the only sense of the word queen.
Examples:
● “second highest ranking piece in a game of chess” referring to the queen chess piece
● “third highest card in a suit, behind ace and king” referring to the playing card queen

It depends on the intention of the speaker what sense of a word or phrase will be conjured.

An expression’s denotation is the class of possible objects, situations, etc. to which the word
can refer in a case of utterance.

If you wanted to refer to a dog near you, the word dog would denote the physical being that you
intend to reference. By using the word dog, you cannot be referring to a cat or a table. You are
denoting THAT particular being which is a dog.
Semiotic Triangle

It is more accurate and neutral to refer to concepts as Psychology as the word thought does
not encompass words that are irrational or stem from feeling/emotion, and it is more relevant to
refer to word/expression as Language. The last apex of the triangle is the Referent, or
whatever things, events or situations in the world the language is about.

Theories of Reference
 Denotational Theory: Direct relationship between linguistic expression (word/phrase)
and object in the real world. Meaning and Semantics= Denotation
● This theory cannot take into account words that do not denote a thing that exists
in the world.

However, for a long time the distinction was not explicitly drawn between an
expression’s referent (the object to which it refers) and its sense (its general meaning,
abstracted from its use to refer). It was the German logician and philosopher of
mathematics Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) who first saw the significance of this
distinction.

● Representational Theory: Meaning is mental representation (sense/concept).

Sense determines reference.

DEIXIS

Certain types of expression, called deictic or indexical expressions (or simply deictics or
indexicals), are defined as words or phrases which make reference to some aspect of the
context of utterance as an essential part of their meaning, like this or here. The meaning of this
in for example, cannot be described except by saying that it refers to some entity in the
speaker’s context of utterance.

The meaning or sense of this, therefore, could be described as an instruction to the hearer to
identify some likely referent in their near proximity, and the meaning of that as the instruction to
identify some likely referent further away

Types of Deixis

● Person deixis, by which speaker (I), hearer (you) and other entities relevant to the
discourse (he/she/it/they) are referred to.
● temporal deixis (now, then, tomorrow).
● discourse deixis, which refers to other elements of the discourse in which the deictic
expression occurs (A: You stole the cash. B: That’s a lie).
● spatial deixis as it is manifested in demonstratives, of which English this and that are
cardinal examples. This, Here (Proximal) That, There (Distal)