referent (n.)

A term used in philosophical LINGUISTICS and SEMANTICS for the entity (object, state of affairs, etc.) in the external world to which a linguistic EXPRESSION relates: for example, the referent of the name Bill Clinton is Bill Clinton himself. The term is found both as part of a two-term analysis of MEANING (e.g. words ~ things) and in three-term analyses (e.g. words ~ concepts ~ things). In linguistics, care is usually taken to distinguish knowledge of the world from knowledge of language: the extralinguistic notion of reference is contrasted with the intralinguistic notion of SENSE, a property arising from the meaning relations between LEXICAL ITEMS and SENTENCES. Some theories draw a distinction between speaker’s reference, or the act of referring to a particular object, as performed by a speaker in making an utterance, and semantic reference, which is equivalent to DENOTATION or EXTENSION. A referential expression is an expression which refers to a particular object, as opposed to a PREDICATE, QUANTIFIER, etc. The related notion of an R-expression in GOVERNMENT-BINDING THEORY applies to NOUN PHRASES which must be FREE. Arbitrary reference is a term used in that theory for the reference of the understood subject represented by PRO.