Thursday, 23rd September 2021.
Semantics and Pragmatics 6CIDI: Sense vs. Denotation
Team 5: María José Del Ángel Ramírez.
Selene Guadalupe Izquierdo Acosta.
Carolina Castillo Burelo.
Jasson Ivan León Arenas.
SENSE
The German logician Gottlob Frege used the
German term Sinn (English SENSE) for those
aspects of meaning which do not depend on the
context of use, the kind of meaning we might
look up in a dictionary.
Deals with relationships inside the language.
Sense of an expression is its place in a system
of semantic relationships with other expressions
in the language.
Meaning relations within language there may
be words that have sense but no denotation
(unicorn, dragon).
The way (mean) through which the sign is
given to us.
But in a fictional universe of discourse (e.g., the
movie King Kong), or in an earlier time period
of our own world (e.g., 30 million BC, when
the gigantic Paraceratherium —estimated
weight about 20,000 kg— walked the earth
Reference
Is what speakers or writers do when they use
expressions to pick out for their audience
particular people, things,
times, places, events, or ideas.
Reference has to be done and interpreted with
regard to context.
Examples of referring expressions are:
people (“my sister”) or things (“the Parthenon
Marbles”) or times (“2007”) or places (“that
corner”) or events (“her birthday party”) or
DENOTATION
Frege used the term Bedeutung (English
DENOTATION) for the other sort of meaning,
which does depend on the context.
The denotation of a content word (e.g., an
adjective, verb, or common noun) is the set of all
the things in the current universe of discourse
which the word could be used to describe.
The relation between a lexeme and whole class of
extra linguistic objects.
What the sing designates (= object itself).
For example, the denotation of yellow is the set of
all yellow things, the denotation of tree is the set
of all trees, the denotation of the intransitive verb
snore is the set of all creatures that snore, etc.
The denotations are context dependent.
Deictic
Deictic expressions are words, phrases and
features of grammar that have to be interpreted in
relation to the situation in which they are uttered,
such as me ‘the sender of this utterance’ or here
‘the place where the sender is’
There are different kinds of deixis, relating to:
participants, persons and other entities or
discourse itself.
Examples of expressions are: A course bulletin
board once carried a notice in Theek 1 of the
academic year worded as in (1.11).
(1.11) “The first tutorial will be held next week.”
ideas (“the plan we were told about”). The notice was not dated, and the tutor forgot to
take it down. Some students who read it in Theek
2 failed to attend the Theek 2 tutorial meeting
because “next week” had by then become Theek
3. Next week is a deictic expression meaning ‘the
week after the one that the speaker or writer is in
at the time of utterance’.

Example 2: Participants, persons, and other

entities: she, her, hers, he, him, his, they, it, this,
that
Discourse itself: this sentence, the next paragraph,
that was what they told me, I want you to
remember this …