REFERENCE AND SENSE
Muchamad Adam Basori, M.A. TESOL
1 October 2011
Meeting Unit 3
Last Week Review
Answer the following:
(1) State which of the following represents an utterance (U) and which a sentence S):
John sang wonderfully last night S / U
‘John sang wonderfully last night’ S / U
(2) Can a sentence be true or false? Yes / No
(3) Is an utterance tied to a particular time and place? Yes / No
(4) Is a sentence tied to a particular time and place? Yes / No
(5) Can a proposition be said to be in any particular language? Yes / No
(6) Can an utterance be true or false? Yes / No
(1) S, U (2) Yes (3) Yes (4) No (5) No (6) Yes
If you have scored less than 5 correct out of 6, you should review Sentences, Utterances and Proposition.
If you have scored at least 5 correct out of 6, continue to the introduction.
Introduction to Today’s Topic
This unit explains some further basic notions in semantics. It is important that you master these notions from the outset as they will keep recurring throughout the course.
You will learn the difference between two quite distinct ways of talking about the meaning of words and other expressions. In talking of sense, we deal with relationships inside the language; in talking of reference we deal with the relationships between language and the world.
Definition of Reference
By means of reference, a speaker indicates which things in the world (including persons) are being talked about.
For example, ‘My son is in the beech tree’
As a further example, when a teacher instructs students to read a text and refer a certain page. He says, “this page”. The phrase this page is a part of the English language. However, the phrase, when it was used in writing a sentence, actually identified a particular sheet of paper, something that you could take between your finger and thumb, a little part of the world. The actual page, the sheet of paper, is not a part of the English language, since languages are not made of pieces of paper.
Comment
So we have two things: the English expression this page (part of the language) and the thing you could hold between your finger and thumb (part of the world). We call the relationship between them ‘reference’.
Practice
Before answering these questions you should carry out the following simple instruction:
è touch your left ear.
(1) Write down the last three words in the above instruction……………………………………
(2) Is the thing you touched a part of the world or a part of the language?..............
(3) Is your answer to (1) a part of the language? Yes / No
(4) If you say to your mother ‘There’s a wasp on your left ear’, does ‘your left ear’ here refer to the thing you touched in response to a previous question? Yes / No
Feedback and Comment
(1) your left ear (2) A part of the world, languages do not have ears. (3) Yes (4) No, it refers to your mother’s left ear.
(2) In the present circumstances, your left ear refers to the thing you touched in response to (1) above. We say that your left ear is the referent of the phrase your left ear: reference is a relationship between parts of a language and things outside the language (in the world).
(3) The same expression can, in some cases, be used to refer to different things. There are as many potential referents for the phrase your left ear as there are people in the world with left ears. Likewise there are as many potential referents for the phrase this page as there are pages in the world. Thus some (in fact very many) expressions in a language can have variable reference.
Definition of Sense
To turn from reference to sense, the SENSE of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language. The first of these semantic relationships that we will mention is sameness of meaning, an intuitive concept which we will illustrate by example. We will deal first with the senses of words in context.
Practice
Say whether the pairs of words in the brackets in the sentences below have approximately the same meaning (S) or a different meaning (D).
(1) I (almost/nearly) fell over S / D
(2) It is (likely/probable) that Raymond will be here tomorrow S / D
(3) Your gatepost doesn’t seem to be quite (vertical/upright) S / D
(4) He painted the fireplace (aquamarine/vermilion) S / D
(5) I’ll see you on (Wednesday/Thursday) S / D
Feedback and Comment
(1) S (2) S (3) S (4) D (5) D
We can talk about the sense, not only of words, but also of longer expressions such as phrases and sentences.
Harriet wrote the answer down
Harriet wrote down the answer
BUT In some cases, the same word can have more than one sense.
I have an account at the Bank of Scotland
We steered the raft to the other bank of the river
We use the term ‘word’ here in the sense of ‘word-form’. That is, we find it convenient to treat anything spelled with the same sequence of letters and pronounced with the same sequence of phonemes (distinctive sounds) in a standard dialect as being the same word.
Thus, for example, we treat bank in the practice above as a single word with many senses. This is the way most non-semanticists use the term ‘word’. We mention this because some semanticists, including almost all compilers of dictionaries, would regard bank, for example, as several different words. In an ordinary dictionary there are several different entries for the word bank, sometimes distinguished by a subscript, e.g. bank1, bank2, etc. No confusion will arise from our relatively non-technical use of the term ‘word’. This matter will be taken up again in a later unit, when we discuss HOMONYMY and POLYSEMY (Meeting Unit 10).
Conclusion
The idea of reference is relatively solid and easy to understand.
BUT, the idea of sense is more elusive: it’s a bit like electricity, which we all know how to use (and even talk about) in various ways, without ever being sure what exactly it is.