[Vocabulary] refer to/mean/express

[jutfrank]

One more question please. I am confused by my nickname here. Is it a reference for me, does it have a reference meaning, is it a referring expression? Or is it a "signifier" and has a "semiotic sense meaning"?

It seems both of your explanations apply. So hhtt23 is both a reference and a signifier, right?

That's basically right, yes. The username hhtt21 is a name, which, when used, refers to you. That's a good example of reference. But remember that reference only truly happens when somebody, like me, uses your username to say something. The sequence of letters and numbers doesn't actually mean anything in itself, but when I use that particular string of letters and numbers in a sentence, then I'm referring to you.

Imagine that I write "hhtt21" on the wall of my neighbour's house. To anybody passing by, it would have no meaning (no 'sense meaning') because that is not a word that is part of any language. It just looks like an almost random string of letters and numbers. However, if I were to write a sentence instead—let's say "hhtt21 is dead!", then it still would not have any 'sense meaning' but it would have 'reference meaning'. The people passing by would understand that it refers to somebody (or possibly something), even though they have no idea who you are.

Your username is also a signifier. Somebody passing by my neighbour's house would see "hht21" on the wall and conclude that it must mean something. It can't just be an accident that these letters appeared on the wall. In this case, it would not have 'sense meaning' or 'reference meaning' but it would have 'sign meaning'.

I'm now going to say everything I just said again, in a different way:

"hhtt21"

sense meaning :cross:
reference meaning :cross:
sign meaning :tick:


"hhtt21 is dead"

sense meaning :cross:
reference meaning :tick:
sign meaning :tick:

Note that the ticks and crosses relate only to the part in bold.

 

[hhtt21]

Talking of use, in the next post I'll focus on another very different kind of meaning, which is very relevant to what we do here on this forum—that of pragmatic meaning, also called speaker meaning. But before I do, do you have any questions about sense?

Everything is clear until this point. Would we continue from here if I didn't interrupt.

 

[jutfrank]

There's an essential difference between the kind of meaning that I have called sense meaning and the kind of meaning that semanticists call speaker meaning.

Sense meaning is more properly called 'word meaning' or 'sentence meaning'. The idea is that you can understand the meaning of a sentence by first understanding the senses of all the words in it. For example, take the sentence:

The eagle flies south at midnight.

Now, if we're thinking about sentence meaning, we can say that this sentence tells us what time, and in what direction, a particular kind of bird travels through the air. The reason we know that is because we understand the senses of all the words involved. If we were not sure about any of the words, we could look them up in a dictionary.

But, we could also easily imagine that sentence as a coded message, perhaps as part of a dialogue between two spies, or as a way for a military intelligence agent to inform about a secret operation. If so, this would have nothing at all to do with birds of prey. As a coded message, it could mean just about anything. The meaning is purely about the information that is communicated, regardless of the words themselves.

Here's another, less dramatic example, from everyday life:

A: Is it 8 o'clock already?
B: Yeah, okay. I'll do it now.

On first hearing, this exchange doesn't seem to make sense. But if I tell you person A is my wife (Mrs jutfrank), and person B is me, and that earlier on that day I promised her that I would make dinner for 7:30, it might become clear that when she asks Is it 8 o'clock already?, she is not enquiring about the time. In fact, if I answered "Yes, it is", she would not be very impressed, because the true meaning (the speaker meaning) of the question is a command. In other words, what she really means is "Go and make dinner now!"

Here's a similar example. My wife and I are getting ready to go out:

jutfrank: Do you like this shirt?
Mrs jutfrank: Where's the blue one?

I wonder if you can guess what my wife's question really means.

This idea of speaker meaning versus sentence meaning is very important to understand because people very often don't say with words what they really mean. What is most important when we are communicating with each other is the information that we want to convey. Speaker meaning explains how it is possible to be sarcastic, and how it is possible to say Yes when we really mean No.

However, it is not the case that everything we say to each other has speaker meaning, I'd argue. Imagine this exchange between two neighbours, who meet at a bus stop.

A: Hi, Alan.
B: Hi, Bob. How are you?
A: Fine, thanks. Nice day.
B: Yeah. Better than yesterday.
A: You can say that again. You never know what to expect at this time of year.
B: Right. How's Janine?

You could say that Alan and Bob are not really saying anything at all because there's no information that is being communicated. The purpose of talking to each other is purely social. A very large proportion of the language we use with each other, and all of the language we use when talking to ourselves is like this, without any speaker meaning whatsoever.

The distinction between sentence meaning and speaker meaning is especially important on a website such as Using English. A very large share of the questions that learners ask are enquiries into the meaning of language, and most of the time, this concerns sentence meaning only. If all learners were aware of the distinction between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, the questions would be a lot better, and it would be a lot easier for us to answer.

I think it is correct to say that of all the many different senses of the verb mean used by native speakers in everyday life, the sense of speaker meaning is by far the most commonly used one.

 

[jutfrank]

This post will now attempt to answer the question in the original post directly.

refer to somebody/something (verb) [linguistic use]

Use this verb for reference meaning only. Simple.


refer to something (verb) [non-linguistic use]

This is not very common but we do sometimes use this verb non-linguistically, when the reference is made by means other than with words.

In a non-linguistic sense, we also use the transitive verb pattern: refer somebody to somebody/something, the sense of which is quite specific. Look at a good dictionary for some examples of use.



mean something (verb) [linguistic and non-linguistic]

We use this verb for almost all the different kinds of meaning, including:

• reference
• sense
• entailment
• synonymy
• translation
• metaphor
• metonymy
• illocution
• implicature
• denotation
• connotation
• representation
• signification

... and many more.

I'll write one more post, about express, and then apart from answering any further questions, that's it.

 

[Tdol]

Opening thread

 

[jutfrank]

I'll write one more post, about express, and then apart from answering any further questions, that's it.

After a full year, I thought I might have gotten away with it, but I've been asked to fulfil my promise to express as best I can what the word express means and how it's used.

We should start by understanding what expression is. Expression is essentially a process of transferring or translating content from one place or one mode to another place or mode. With language, this normally means putting what's going on inside your mind into words. There are sometimes said to be (at least) four different kinds of linguistic expression:

• expressing thoughts
• expressing feelings
• expressing needs and wants
• expressing senses and perceptions

To help me explain, I'll first expand on the first of these, which I think is most relevant to what hhtt21 wants to know: expression of thought into language.

One view of meaning that I find very convincing is that when you have a thought in your head, it has some kind of pre-linguistic structure, whether that be visual/spatial or conceptual. For the sake of this post, I'll call this 'thought structure'. What a person does when she speaks is to transform 'thought structure' into 'phonological structure'. The thought now 'sounds like' something. In a sense, you can say that the thought has changed form, from being non-linguistic to linguistic. That's what linguistic expression is. A simple way to say this is that we express our thoughts with words. We can also express questions, commands, requests, promises, suggestions—all using language. We can also express our feelings and emotions, our needs and wants, our beliefs, and our sensory observations, with words. There are other, non-linguistic ways to express these things too, of course: We can express our feelings with dance, our ideas in a painting, our emotions with our facial muscles. Regardless of the way that expression happens, there must always be some kind of meaning going on.

In terms of what we've said previously about different kinds of meaning, we can say that speaker meaning first arises in the form of thought in the speaker's mind, gets translated in the mind/brain by expression into phonological form (the particular language, i.e. English or Turkish that the speaker speaks), then articulated by the vocal tract and mouth parts by utterance. The sound produced then travels through the air by propagation into the mind/brain of the hearer, who then tries to understand it by interpretation. How this all happens is something of a mystery to linguists and neuroscientists alike.

We can also use the notion of expression when we talk about putting one phonological form into another phonological form. Perhaps you have a well-formed Turkish sentence in your mind, and you want to know how to express it in English. Still, the basic idea is the same: there is a translation from one form into another. That's what expression is.

Finally, here are some English sentences showing how the word is used in various contexts:

My darling Isolde—words cannot express how much I miss you.
My French isn't great but I know how to express myself most of the time.
For my maths homework, I have to express 22/7 as a percentage.
Thank you for allowing me to express my thoughts on the subject of meaning.