Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Sense and Reference
Reference : relation between piece of language and the things in the world. A referent is concrete object or concept that is designated by a word or expression, for example :
Historically, there was only one person called George Washington, the first president of US, but he can be referred to in a text in many ways, such as:
- the president
- Mr. Washington
- he
The different reference can have the same referent.
Example : morning star and evening star, both of which refer to planet Venus.
Sense : its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language. Sense consists of 'semantic properties'. Example:
Woman has a sense of animate, female, married.
Girl has a sense of animate, female, unmarried.
To know what a woman means, you have to know what a girl means, so that you get the idea why a woman is different from a girl.
To make it simple, sense is the meaning of an expression, and if an expression refers to something, it has reference.
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Found this while googling "sense and reference", thanks! First thing I've read that's even 1/2 made sense to me.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much, This was very helpfull
ReplyDeletei am preparing exams for this topic, it helps!
ReplyDeletehappy to hear from you, readers. Good luck for your exams
ReplyDeletethis the only xplanation I've found in google about sense and reference,that actualy makes sense!!!
ReplyDeleteEasy and helpfull.......this is what do we need a day before exams
ReplyDelete