For books, there exists the ISBN and for journal articles, the Digital object identifier (DOI) is gaining relevance. References to many types of printed matter may come in an electronic or machine-readable form. See also: Reference work and Reference desk These could be the agent (actor) and patient (acted on), as in "The man washed himself", the theme and recipient, as in "I showed Mary to herself", or various other possible combinations. The subset of reflexives expresses co-reference of two participants in a sentence. thought.Ĭertain parts of speech exist only to express reference, namely anaphora such as pronouns. The very concept of the linguistic sign is the combination of content and expression, the former of which may refer entities in the world or refer more abstract concepts, e.g. Some cases seem to be too complicated to be classified within this framework the acceptance of the notion of secondary reference may be necessary to fill the gap. This problem led Frege to distinguish between the sense and reference of a word. Gottlob Frege argued that reference cannot be treated as identical with meaning: " Hesperus" (an ancient Greek name for the evening star) and " Phosphorus" (an ancient Greek name for the morning star) both refer to Venus, but the astronomical fact that '"Hesperus" is "Phosphorus"' can still be informative, even if the "meanings" of "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" are already known. In syntactic analysis, if a word refers to a previous word, the previous word is called the " antecedent". The converse relation, the relation from object to word, is called " exemplification" the object exemplifies what the word denotes. Sometimes the word-object relation is called " denotation" the word denotes the object. The object referred to is called the referent of the word.
The word "it" refers to some previously specified object. Hence, the word "John" refers to the person John. In semantics, reference is generally construed as the relationships between nouns or pronouns and objects that are named by them.
The triangle of reference, from the influential book The Meaning of Meaning (1923) by C. Some of them are described in the sections below. References feature in many spheres of human activity and knowledge, and the term adopts shades of meaning particular to the contexts in which it is used. In some cases, methods are used that intentionally hide the reference from some observers, as in cryptography. References can take on many forms, including: a thought, a sensory perception that is audible ( onomatopoeia), visual (text), olfactory, or tactile, emotional state, relationship with other, spacetime coordinate, symbolic or alpha-numeric, a physical object or an energy projection. Its referent may be anything – a material object, a person, an event, an activity, or an abstract concept. A name is usually a phrase or expression, or some other symbolic representation. The second object, the one to which the first object refers, is called the referent of the first object. It is called a name for the second object. The first object in this relation is said to refer to the second object. Reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. For other uses, see Reference (disambiguation).