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3 Meaning in the sense is something, which is performed rather than something
that exists in a static way. It involves action the speaker produces and effect on the hearer and interaction the meaning being negotiated between the
speaker and the hearer on the basis of their mutual language.
Richard 1985:172 states “meaning is what language expresses about the world we live in or any possible or imagery word”.
Lyons 1977:2 says that “the meaning can be distinguished by the technique of
substituting other words in the same context and enquiry whether the resulting sentences are equivalent”.
2.4 Sense and Reference
Word and phrases normally both have sense and reference. In order to have a better understanding of word and references, there should be a distinction between its sense and
reference. According to Frege, a German philosopher and mathematician, the sense of a word is the additional meaning attached to the word. Other linguists who contributed the meaning
of sense and reference in his book Lyons 1997:197 says “sense is the term used by a number of philosopher for what others would describe simply as their meaning or perhaps
more their cognitive or descriptive meaning”.
According to Palmer 1976:30, “reference deals with the relationship with between the linguistic elements, words, sentence, 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 relation.”
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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 difficult. The first phrase refers to ‘the person who is my biological father’, while the
second one refers to ‘the person who necessarily my father’.
Another example is:
‘The present King of Indonesia is bald’
We have no trouble comprehending the meaning of this sentence has a sense, but hasn’t reference.
2.5 Goal of Semantics
According to Leech 1981:20-21, there are two questions which must be answered concerning with the goals of semantics theory; what should a semantics theory do and how
should it do it? A semantics theory should attribute to each expression in the language which the
semantics properties and relations. The answer to the second question is that a semantics theory should have at least two
kinds of constraints: 1.
Semantics theory of natural language should be finite; people are capable of storing only a finite amount of formation but they nevertheless learn the
semantics of natural languages,
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2. Semantics theory of natural language should reflect the fact, except for the
idioms, expression are compositional. This means that their meaning is determined by the meaning of its constituents and their grammatically
relations.
2.6 Varieties of Meaning
