sense (n.)

In SEMANTICS, this term is usually contrasted with REFERENCE, as part of an explication of the notion of MEANING. Reference, or DENOTATION, is seen as EXTRALINGUISTIC – the entities, states of affairs, etc. in the external world which a linguistic EXPRESSION stands for. Sense, on the other hand, refers to the SYSTEM of linguistic relationships (sense relations or semantic relations) which a LEXICAL ITEM contracts with other lexical items – the PARADIGMATIC relationships of SYNONYMY, ANTONYMY, etc., and the SYNTAGMATIC relationships of COLLOCATION. In semantic theories deriving from the work of German logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), the sense of an EXPRESSION is a ‘mode of presentation’ of the expression’s REFERENT, and also serves indirectly as the expression’s referent in OPAQUE contexts. In POSSIBLE-WORLDS SEMANTICS, the sense of an expression is a FUNCTION mapping each possible world (or world–time pair) onto the expression’s EXTENSION relative to that world (or pair); also called INTENSION.