Group 2 Semantics

REFERENCE AND SENSE REFERRING EXPRESSIONS

Conclusion
REFERENCE AND SENSE

Sawitri Erlianingtyas
Semarang 19 september 1998
NIM 2302180007
 REFERENCE AND SENSE

REFERENCE Example

Example
S E NS E
Reference are 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
with ‘reference’.
 By means of reference, a speaker
indicates which things in the
world (including persons) are
being talked about.
Example ‘My son is in the beech tree’
identifies identifies person thing

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the SENSE of an expression is its place in a
system of semantic relationships with other
expressions in the language.
We can talk about the sense, not only of
words, but also of longer expressions such
as phrases and sentences.
Practice Intuitively, do the following pairs mean the
same or nearly the same thing?
(1) Rupert took off his jacket
Rupert took his jacket off Yes / No
(2) Harriet wrote the answer down
Harriet wrote down the answer Yes / No
-Feedback (1) Yes (2) Yes (You may not have agreed,
but it’s not too important, as we are dealing with a
quite rough-and-ready concept at this stage. Try to see
the ways our answers fit the questions.)
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. for example,
we treat bank in the practice above as a
single word with many senses.
 -Practice Do the following words refer to things in
the world?
(1) almost Yes / No
(2) probable Yes / No
- Practice (1) When you look up the meaning of a
word in a dictionary, what do you find there, its
referent, or an expression with the same sense?

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REFERRING EXPRESSIONS

Siti Nurohmah
Tegal, 18 Maret 1991
NIM 2302180013
REFERRING EXPRESSIONS INDEFINITE NOUN PHRASE

DEFINITE NOUN PHRASE

OPAQUE CONTEXT EQUATIVE SENTENCE

REFERRING EXPRESSION is any expression used in an utterance
to refer to something or someone (or a clearly delimited collection
of things or people), i.e. used with a particular referent in mind.
•Example:
1. Fred hit me.
2. There’s no Fred a this address.
•Explanations:
1. (The name Fred in an utterance ‘Fred hit me’, where the speaker
has a particular person in mind when he says ‘Fred’, is a referring
expression.
2. (Fred in ‘There’s no Fred a this address’ is not a referring
expression, because in this case speaker would not have a
particular person in mind in uttering the word. Next
 Other examples in this book:
- John
- My uncle
- The girl sitting on the wall by the bus stop
- A man
- My parents

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 • INDEFINITE NOUN PHRASE
The same expression can be referring expression or not (or, as some
would put it, may or may not have a ‘referring interpretation’),
depending on the context.
• Examples:
When a speaker says:
1. ‘A man wa in here looking for you last night.’
2. ‘Fourty buses have been withdraw from service by the Liverpool
Corporation.’

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 Other example with abiguities referring expression:
1.‘Nancy married a Norwegian.’
2.‘Nancy wants to marry a Norwegian’
3.‘Dick believes that a man with a limp killed Bo Beep’
4.‘A man with a limp killed Bo Beep’
A n expression examples above is a referring expression
is heavily depend on linguistic contex and on
circumtances of utterance.

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 • DEFINITE NOUN PHRASE
Such as; Proper name, Personal pronouns and longer descriptive
expressions.
• Examples:
When speaker says:
1. ‘John is my best friend.’
2. ‘He is a very polite man.’
3. ‘It’s sinking!’
4. ‘The man who shot Abraham Lincoln was an unemployed actor.’

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 examples with define noun phrase but not cleary
referring expressions:
1.he in ‘If anyone ever marries Nancy, he’s in for a
bad time’
(meaning that whoever marries Nancy is in for a
bad time)
2.it in ‘Every man who owns a donkey beats it’
(it doesn’t refer to any particular donkey here)
• OPAQUE CONTEXT is a part of a sentence which could be
made into a complete sentence by the addition of a referring
expression, but where the addition of different referring
expressions, even though they refer to the same thing or person,
in a given situation, will yield sentences with DIFFERENT
meanings when uttered in a given situation.
• Examples:
A: ‘Laura Bush thinks that the President is a genius’
B: ‘Laura Bush thinks that the Leader of the Republican Party is a
genius’

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 EQUATIVE SENTENCE is one which is used to assert the identity of the
referents of two referring expressions, i.e. to assert that two referring expressions
have the same referent.
Examples:
•Tony Blair is the Prime Minister.
•That woman over there is my daughter’s teacher.
•John is the person in the corner.
•Henry the Eighth is the current President of the USA.
Feature of many equative sentences is that the order of the two referring
expressions can be reversed without loss of acceptability.
Examples:
• The largest city in Africa is Cairo
•Cairo is the largest city in Africa

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 Conclusion
yudhystira
Lampung 09 April 2000
NIM 2302180016
Reference as a relation between expressions used in utterances and people and
objects in the world seems straightforward enough. But stating simple
generalizations about when an expression is actually a referring expression and
when it is not, is, to say the least, difficult. Both indefinite and definite noun
phrases can be ambiguous between referring and non-referring interpretations,
with the appropriate interpretation being highly dependent on linguistic context
(i.e. the surrounding words) and the circumstances of the utterance. The
existence of opaque contexts also provides interesting complications to the
contribution of referring expressions to meaning.

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