Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of English

Introduction to Linguistics

Fall 2004

Week 3: Notes on Allen (2001), pp. 41-74.

Where do words get their meaning?

Reference and the connection to the world.

Sense

This relates to the more fixed basis of a words meaning as is supposedly coded in the lexicon. The sense of a word is related to other words in the form or fixed and regularized relationships. These relationships include, synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms and others. The sense meaning is both decontextualized and idealized in its basis on these other relationships.

Denotation

Denotation is a neutral relation between objects denoted in language and objects in the world.

Reference

Reference is basically about how a speaker intends to use denotational relationships in their speech. The basic idea is that a referent has many possible meanings, but these meanings do not often match its denotational meaning. The relationship between the world and language is not one-to one. It is not clear. A dog, for example, does not always mean a dog in the same way. Reference is about choosing the specific properties of a denotation and using theme as a point of reference. This is all about speaker language

Meaning comes from the interaction of sentence meaning and utterance meaning.

Sentence meaning is the actual meaning encoded in the specific elements of the structure.

Utterance meaning is the underlying intent behind the elements in the structure which may or may not go way beyond their sentence meaning.

Intension

For Allen the intension falls back to the idea of sense. Intension is a collection of idealized and regularized properties of a specific lexical entity. These are the features that every lexical entry has and are shared by all speakers of the language in question.

Extension

Extension brings us back to the notion of speaker language and reference. Since all lexical entities are composed of a wide variety of different features and all of these features are not used or needed at any one time what extension boils down to is which features are going to be used. This is related and regulated by both the sentence meaning and the utterance meaning as directed by the speaker in their own choices of specific language forms and combinations.

Thus, to try to understand the intended meaning of a sentence a listener or reader needs to understand which properties of a specific word`s meaning are being used by the speaker/writer. This is achieved through an understanding of the sentence meaning correlated with the utterance meaning.