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MEANING, THOUGHT AND REALITY

Elements used in order to understand our ability of using language to describe the world.

Some of this elements are:

REFERRING

DENOTING

Used for:

Used for:

The action of a speaker in picking out entities in the world. WHAT SPEAKERS DO.

The relationship between a linguistic expression and the world. PROPERTY OF WORDS.

There are 2 theories of meaning used to understand this elements:

REFERENTIAL (Denotational) APPROACH

REPRESENTATIONAL APPROACH

Semantic description of how linguistic expressions fit into the world.

Semantic description of how words and sentences relate to

REFERRING AND NON-REFERRING EXPRESSIONS

There are different types of references

The fist type it's used to refer to entities, the second one can't be identified in the world (if, so, very)

CONSTANT VERSUS VARIABLE EXPRESSIONS

Some expressions have the same referent (The Eiffel Tower), while others depent on context (I, you, she)

REFERENTS AND EXTENSIONS

The referent would be the thing picked out by saying something, while the extension would be a set of things that could be the possible referent.

There are some major aspects of nominal references

NAMES

For the description theory names are a label or a shorthand for knowledge about the REFERENT (Identifiying knowledge). While the causal theory names are inherited or borrowed (social knowledge).

NOUNS AND NOUN PHRASES

They are used to refer to an individual (José), to fit definite descriptions (the manager of the store), also where is not referent to fit the description (the king of France is bold), or when the referent is not real (the wizard of Oz). Finally, they are used to refer to a group of individuals or to a group of substances, actions or abstract ideas.

References can be seen as a theory of meaning

Which means that the meaning of an expression will arise from its sense and its reference.

They can also refer to

MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS

Also called SENSE. A word gain its ability to denote because it is related to something in the speaker's mind.

Which need some basic approaches to be described:

CONCEPTS

They are lexicalized (or not) because of utility reasons.

NECESSARY CONDITIONS

PROTOTYPES

RELATIONS BETWEEN CONCEPTS

ACQUIRING CONCEPTS