Some words do not have a referent, but instead express relationships or characteristics. Examples: The word "apple" can refer to a fruit, but it can shift its reference to a brand of electronic products.
Shitting referents are different for each speaker and each sentence. Pronouns have shifting referents.
Sense allows us to understand words that have no concrete referent.
Words can also refer to prevaricated things and abstract concepts
The referential meaning describes the referent. The referential meaning of a word is its definition.
Some words have an actual concrete concept called referent.
In each person's brain there is a lexicon.
Language is a system of symbols
Examples:
1. In mathematics, the symbol "+" is used to represent the addition operation.
2. In music, musical notes like "do," "re," and "mi" are symbols representing specific tones.
Study of signs and symbols is called semiotics
Lexical semantics deals with the meaning of words and structural semantics deals with the meaning of larger utterances.
Index has a causal relationship to what it indicates.
A symbol can be used to create real or prevaricated concepts and represent abstractions.
The symbol is not the thing that it represents and it is free to be anything.
Markedness in semantics
Example of ender Markedness: actor, actress.
The analysis of how languages express meaning through the choice of marked and unmarked forms is a widely used concept in the field of linguistics.
This supports linguists in examining how different linguistic elements relate to each other and how these choices affect how language is understood.
The concept of markedness plays a fundamental role in semantics as it aids in comprehending how languages encode meaning and effectively convey nuances via their linguistic structures.
The concept of markedness provides insight into the perception of the world by native speakers of a language.
The notion of certain words or morphemes being more prevalent or customary than others is being questioned.
