useful to explain it. The dictionary is usually concerned with sense relations, with relating words to words. For instance, when we look up the meaning of a word in
dictionary, we must find an expression or more with the same sense, not referent. Other descriptions make a clear distinction between reference and sense.
Consider the noun phrase, the president of the United States. Its reference at the time of this writing is Barrac
k Obama. Its sense is “head of state of USA.” The sense is more enduring.
20
Therefore, 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. B
y contrast, a word‟s sense doesn‟t change every time the word takes on a new referent.
21
B. Literal and Non-Literal Meaning
In the study of meaning, it can not be apart from kind of meaning called literal meaning. The literal meaning of a linguistic expression is its conventional
meaning: the meaning it has in virtue of the conventions which are constitutive of the language. Thus understood literal meaning is a property of the expression-
type; for it is the expression type which the conventions of the language endow with a particular meaning.
22
Whenever the meaning which the expression actually conveys departs from that literal m
eaning, it is said to be „non-literal‟, in ordinary sense of the term, non-literal meaning contrast with normal meaning. Non-literal
20
Victoria Fromkin at.al. an Introduction to Language, seventh Edition. Massachusetts: Heinle Thomson, 2003, p. 191.
21
Nick Riemer, Ibid., p. 18.
22
Francois Recanati, Literal Meaning Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 68.
meaning is special, it involves a form of deviance or departure from the norm; a form of deviance or departure which must be transparent to the language users.
23
Non-literal meaning is generally known as figurative meaning. It would be a reasonable requirement of a dictionary that it should indicate which meaning are
literal and which figurative: most users would probably, assume that literal meaning would be given first. However, this is not really a satisfactory
explanation of what literalness is.
24
Both distinctions are legitimate. It can be distinction between conventional meaning and conveyed meaning, and between
normal meaning and the special meanings assigned to words when the speaker speaks figuratively or conveys something indirectly.
The paradigm case of non literal meaning is metaphor. Cognitive linguist reject the so-called substitution theory of metaphor according to which a
metaphorical expression replaces some literal expression that has the same meaning. Metaphors „true‟ metaphor, in general, are not literally paraphrasable:
they have a character that no literal expression has. At the same time, although metaphorical meaning has a special character that distinguishes it from any literal
meaning, it has the same range of basic functions as literal meaning. Of course, many metaphorical expressions have a heavy load of expressive meaning. But so
do many literal expressions. In other words, metaphorical meaning is not, at least in basic functional respect, a special kind of meaning: it is rather the case that
23
Ibid., p. 81.
24
Alan Cruse, Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 195.
metaphor is the result of special process for arriving at, or construing, a meaning.
25
C. Metaphor
