Sense & Reference

Sense & Reference
Ghyzayel Al-Otaibi
Reference
is a relationship between parts of a language (words & phrases) and things outside the language (in the world). "My son" refers to a person in the world. A
referring expression
is any expression used in an utterance to refer to something or someone. A
referent
is the person or thing in the world speakers refer to by using a referring expression. The relation between a referring expression and a referent is what we call reference.
Reference

Notes:
1. The same referring expression can, in some cases, be used to refer to different referents. For instance, the referring expression "this book" can be used to refer to different books.


Reference
Two different referring expressions can have the same referent. 'Riyadh' and 'the capital of Saudi Arabia' both refer to the same place.
Sense VS. Reference
The referent of an expression is often a thing or person in the world; whereas the sense of an expression is not a thing at all. The sense of an expression is an abstraction in the mind of a language user . When a person understands fully what is said to him, it is reasonable to say that he grasps the sense of the expression he hears.

Sense & Reference

Every meaningful expression has sense but not every meaningful expression has reference. For example, 'almost', 'if', and 'probable' have sense, but they do not refer to a thing in the world.
Sense
The sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language. For example, the relationship between 'big' and 'small' is that of antonymy.
Notes
In some cases, the same word-form can have more than one sense. The word
bank
is an example.
Two words can have the same sense.
Synonymous
words are examples.
Two sentences may have the same sense. Equivalent sentences are examples.
One sentence can have different senses. Consider, for example, The chicken is ready to eat.