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There are two different sort of meanings, linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. In general, linguistic meaning is meaning of that expression in some
from of language. Speaker meaning is what a speaker means in producing an utterance.
The following figure can show how meaning can have several distinctions : Meaning
Linguistic meaning Speaker Meaning
Language-meaning Idiolect-meaning Literal Non Literal
Dialect Meaning
Regional Social
Figure 1 Some Varieties of Meaning
2.2.2 Sense and Reference
One important point made by the linguists Ferdinand de Saussure 1974, whose ideas have been so influential in the development of modern linguistics, is
that the meaning of linguistic expressionns derives from the two sources: the language they are part of anf the world they describe. Words stand in a
relationship to the world, or our mental classification of it: they allow us to identify parts of the world, and make statements about them. Thus if a speaker
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says He saw Paul or She bought a dog, the underlined nominals identify, pick out
or refer to specific entities in the world. However words also derive their value
from their position within the language system. The relationship by which
language hooks on to the world is usually called reference. The semantic links between elements within the vocabulary system is an aspect of their sense or
meaning. Words other than proper names both have a meaning and can be used to
refer to things and objects. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege proposed a distinction between the reference of a word and the sense of a
word. The reference of a word and the sense of a word. The reference of a word is the object designated, while the sense of a word is the additional meaning. On the
other hand F.R. Palmer 1976: 30 says that reference deals with the relationship between the linguistic elements, word, sentences etc, and the nonlinguistic world
of experience. Sense relation is the complex system of relationship that hold between the linguistic elements themselves mostly the words ; it is concerned
only with intralinguistic relations Phrases, like words, normally both have sense and can be used to refer.
Thus, the phrase “The woman who is my mother” refers to a certain individual and has a certain sense which could be different from that of
“The woman who married my father”, although both expression usually have the same reference.
2.3 Varieties of Meaning
