Reference, Sense and Denotation

Lexical Semantics (word semantics) is a sub-field of Semantic Analysis. It

has two sub-divisions, which they are; Reference and Sense.
Let’s start shedding the lights on the sub-division reference: as its name
suggests, we use reference to refer to different entities (people, animals,
objects, etc…).
Let’s take an example to know how this works. Someone is crossing the
street, and there was a speedy car running very fast toward him. Someone
else yelled at him, “WATCH OUT for the Speedy Car.” The one who
yelled, who he had noticed the speedy car, wanted to warn the person who
was crossing the street that there is a speedy car. The phrase, speedy car,
here is used to refer to the object of reference, which is called Referent.
Let’s suppose that you had been somewhere nearby the incident and you
heard everything, you would understand what is going on by only hearing.
How is that? Since you have a mental image of a speedy car in your mind,
and you know how dangerous it could be. You recalled that concept, or
mental representation of that thing, that’s what we call Sense. The sense of
an expression determines which object specifically we are referring to in
the real world. Thus, we can’t refer to something, without prior knowledge
of the sense of that thing. And sense is not a thing or an object that has
physical existence, it’s an abstract idea that we, the language users, bear in
our minds.
We have to take into consideration the semantic Triangle, which was first
introduced by Ogden and Richards (1923), The meaning of meaning. The
semantic triangle helps us to know how we get to meaning. The phrase
“speedy car” is a linguistic expression. This linguistic expression denotes
something that is existed in the real world. That linguistics expression
signifies the object, the speedy car. This leads us to a new linguistic
phenomenon which is Denotation. Denotation is a stable relationship
between a linguistic expression, a word, and its referent in the real world.
 Sense

The semantic Triangle

Linguistic Expression Denotation

Why reference is not involved in the semantic triangle?

Since reference depicts the speaker’s intention, it doesn’t have a stable
relationship with sense and denotation because some references can lead
us to more than one referent. For example, the word ‘bat’ it means either a
flying mammal or sports equipment. We can refere to anything in the
world, even myths; a unicorn, for instance, using different kinds of
linguistic expressions.
Although ‘unicorn’ has no existance in the real world, so it has no primary
denotation, we can show or draw a picture of a unicorn to someone who
has no prior knowledge of what a unicorn is, and that’s called secondary
denotation.
Note: in some sources, reference is called extension and sense is called
intension.
To sum up, we make sense of the linguistic expression using the mental
image, the prior knowledge, that we bear in our minds of that thing so we
can denote to it.

Summerised by: Omar Rabea’ Mohammed