Then, in the second sentence means ‘work’, and in the third run means ‘manage or organize’.
However, in using language, a speaker may use a word to mean something different from what it literally means as understood in the following:
Gray 1984: 114 says, “Literal meaning of statement is its most exact, precise and limited, meaning, without attention to secondary or symbolic meaning
metaphorical meaning, etc” Based on the quotation above, it can be said that each meaning of words
used in utterances or expression has lexical meanings or most exact to what the dictionary says, without attention to figurative meanings. If a meaning of an
expression used is literal sense, of course, it can be easily interpreted.
2.2.2 Sense and Reference
Word and phrases normally both have sense and reference. In order to have a better understanding of a word and references, there should be a distinction
between its sense and reference. A German philosopher and mathematician, Frege, proposed the senses of a
word is the additional meaning attached to the word. Other linguists who contributed the meaning of sense and reference in his book is Lyons 1979: 197
says “sense is the term used by a number of philosopher for what others would describe simply as their meaning or perhaps more narrowly as their cognitive or
descriptive meaning”. According to Palmer 1976: 30, “Reference deals with the
relationship with between the linguistic elements, words, sentence,
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etc, and the nonlinguistic world of experience. Sense related to the complex system of relationships that hold between the linguistics
elements themselves mostly the word; it is concerned only with intra linguistic relations.”
Base on the Palmer’s idea, we can say that the reference of word is the object designated by the word for example, the reference of the word ‘chair’ is the
object designated by the word, which can be pictured as an upside down number four.
According to Lyons 1979: 177 “ to say that sentence contains a referring expression is to say that it contains and
expression is to say that it contains and expression which on some occasions of the utterance of the sentences may be used to refer”.
Reference can be said as a link of signifier and signified by words. The signifier is a word in the language and the signified is the object in the worlds that
stands for, refers to or denotes. It is an obvious fact that reference is the centre of symbol and object. Through reference, the language being mentioned is associated
to the world. At present there are two major theories or references, they are the
Description theory and the Historical Chain theory. In description theory, an expression refers to its referent because it describes the referent. For instance, the
phrase the first person to set foot in the moon refers to Neil Amstrong since the description fits him. The Historical Chain theory says that an expression refers to
referent by a certain historical relation between the words uttered and some initial dubbing of the object with the name. For example, when the speaker use the name
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Charles de Gaulle it refers to the person christened by that name, provided there is a chain of uses linking the current speaker’s reference with the original
christening. The difference of sense and reference can be seen in the phrase “the man
who is my father” and “the man who married my mother”. Both of these sentences have the same reference; they refer to ‘my mother’s husband’. Nevertheless, the
sentences of those phrases are different. The first phrase refers to ‘the person who is my biological father’, while the second one refers to ‘the person who
necessarily my father’. In short, a word phrase might be having more than one sense. When some
one is speaking about the meaning of word, he she usually speaks about one of its senses, which is usually believed as the primary senses. By this, we can say
that in order to understand a phrase, it must have sense. A phrase would still be understandable even though it has no reference, but without sense, we would not
able to understand it. We can see it in this sentence: ‘the king of the United States has two daughters’. The meaning of this sentence is understandable, even though
there is no king the United States.
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3. FIGURATIVE EXPRESSIONS
