Sense/reference/denotation/connotation
As we have already seen, the English word ‘meaning’ is rather vague. One important distinction we can make within the general notion of a lexeme’s meaning is between its sense and its referent (or reference). To simplify the introduction of these terms, we will confine our discussion to nouns; we will see in 1.6.1 how they apply to other lexical categories.
The sense of a lexeme may be defined as the general meaning or the concept underlying the word. As a first approximation, we can describe this as what we usually think of as contained in a dictionary entry for the word in question, although we will see later that this characterization needs significant modification. The notion of sense can be made more explicit through contrast with the category of referent. A word’s referent is the object which it stands for on a specific occasion of use. For example, consider (28):
If I am talking about a rowdy evening at Buckingham Palace in 2009, the referent of the word queen is Her Majesty, Elizabeth II, and the referent of the word table is a particular piece of English royal furniture. But if I am talking not about Elizabeth II but about Queen Margrethe of Denmark, the words queen and table have different referents: not Elizabeth II and the English piece of furniture, but Margrethe and the Danish one. On each of the occasions (28) is uttered, there is one and only one referent of each word.
A word’s referent, then, is the particular thing, person, place, etc. which an expression stands for on a particular occasion of use, and it changes each time the word is applied to a different object or situation in the world. (As we will see in Chapter 3, not all uses of nouns are referring, but we will ignore this for the moment.) By contrast, a word’s sense does not change every time the word takes on a new referent. Regardless of whether the referent of queen is Elizabeth II or Margrethe, its sense is something like ‘female reigning monarch’. This is not to say, however, that ‘female reigning monarch’ is the only sense of the word queen. Another sense of queen is ‘second highest ranking piece in a game of chess’. This would be the sense involved if I uttered (28) while talking about a game of chess in the café, where queen would refer to a particular chess piece. Yet another sense of the word queen is ‘third highest card in a suit, behind ace and king’: this would be the sense involved if I uttered (28) in reference to a game of bridge at the kitchen table. In these two cases, queen does not only have two new different referents, the particular chess piece and the particular card, but two new different senses as well: ‘second highest ranking piece in a game of chess’ and ‘third highest card in a suit, behind ace and king’. In all the utterances of (28), by contrast, ‘table’ has the single sense ‘piece of furniture with raised flat surface used for putting things on, eating at, etc.’. Obviously, words like queen and table stand for many different people and objects in the world: they have, in other words, many different referents. The referents change each time we talk about a different queen, or a different table. The entire class of objects, etc., to which an expression correctly refers is called the expression’s denotation.
Words have the referents they have by virtue of a certain act on the part of the speaker, which we will call the act of reference. We will use this term to describe what the speaker does in applying a particular language expression to a particular referent in the world. In uttering (29), for example, the speaker makes reference to a certain person, Dr Schreber, to a certain disease, his first illness, and to a certain time, the autumn of 1884. These individual objects are the referents of the words in (29), and it is only in virtue of an act of reference, undertaken by the speaker, that the words ‘Dr Schreber’, ‘first illness’, and ‘the autumn of 1884’, have the referents they do. Since reference is an act, it is subject to exactly the same problems as all other human ventures, and it may not be successful. Thus, if I suddenly say to you ‘I saw that cat again’, and you don’t know what cat I mean, reference will not have been successful. Even though I, as speaker, have referred to a particular cat, you (the hearer) are not able to recover the referent intended, i.e. identify the cat in question.
Reference, referents and denotation
Some writers use the term reference and denotation interchangeably, but in this book we will distinguish the two. An expression’s denotation is the class of possible objects, situations, etc. to which the word can refer. The term reference, by contrast, has two uses:
• as the name of the act by which a speaker refers to a referent;
• as a synonym of referent, i.e. as the term for the object(s) to which an expression refers on a particular instance of use.
In this book, we will not try to distinguish these two senses of reference with separate terminology. Reference sometimes means the act of refer ring, and sometimes means a referent. The context will remove any doubt about which sense is intended.
Sense, reference and denotation are three aspects of what is commonly conveyed by the loose term ‘meaning’. A fourth, very important aspect of meaning is connotation. Connotation names those aspects of meaning which do not affect a word’s sense, reference or denotation, but which have to do with secondary factors such as its emotional force, its level of formality, its character as a euphemism, etc. ‘Police officer’ and ‘cop’, for example, have very different connotations, but similar denotations, as do the following pairs:
We will consider connotation again in Chapter 11.
QUESTION Think of some other pairs of words in English or any other language you know which have different connotations. Would you also want to say that they have different senses?
