Semantics

26 BASIC SEMANTICS
1.3. MEANING AND THE WORLD. DIFFERENT
DIMENSIONS OF MEANING
1.3.1. Reference, denotation and sense
Denotation has to do with the human cognitive capacity of making
concepts and using words to name such concepts. When a child is learning
to speak and he/ she is able to differentiate and group various types of
animals, he/she will be able to say cat and dog. He/she then will be
denoting and saying that this particular dog is a member of that particular
group of animals.
When it comes to explaining denotation, Lyons (1995) points out that
words may be put into correspondence with classes of entities in the
external world by means of the relation of denotation. In addition,
denotation is intrinsically connected with reference and some authors
(particularly those who subscribe to a referential theory of meaning)
draw no distinction between them. Lyons, however, differentiates them
and bases his approach on the two ways in which language maps on to
the world, which leads to the difference between reference and denotation.
He explains that the denotation of an expression is invariant and it is
utterance-independent: it is part of the meaning which the expression
has in the language-system, independently of its use on particular
occasions of utterance. Reference, in contrast, is variable and utterancedependent.
But Lyons also mentions Odgen and Richards’ (1923) distinction
between referent and reference. While the term ‘referent’ specifies any object
or state of affairs in the external world that is identified by means of a
word or expression, the term ‘reference’ points to the concept which
mediates between the word or expression and the ‘referent’. Different types
of reference include noun and noun phrases. In addition, there are referring
and non-referring expressions. The referential uses of different nominals
have produced a vast amount of research in to the philosophy of language,
covering names, common nouns, definite nominals, etc.
In connection with this, the concept of ‘sense’ is introduced. The sense
of an expression may be defined as the set or network of sense relations
that hold between it and other expressions of the same language. Descriptive
synonymy, for example, is a sense relation. Sense is an interlexical or intralingual
relation; it defines relations within the same language. On the other
hand, denotation relates expressions to classes of entities in the world.
Frege (1970[1892]) provides the basis for the distinction between sense
and reference and its further development from a formal logic point of