We have just looked at how words in a language are related to each other. We also know that words are related to their referents: the objects, people, places, activities, and concepts that are outside of the system of words. We know that this is an arbitrary relationship and that any word could be the one with a relationship to that referent, but still that relationship is made by the users of a language. We will now explore the relationship between a word and its referent.

Activity: Pictionary

Generally people think that a word refers directly to its referent, or the real world person, thing, place, or idea. The activity above seems to confirm this idea, and there are several ways to talk about the relationship between a word and its referent.

Denotation

Denotation is often defined as the “dictionary definition” of a word. Denotation is the term for the attempt to create a one-to-one mapping of word to referent. This is the term to use when you want to say "this word means this thing." Denotation subscribes to the idea that there is one exact, clear, shared-by-all meaning for a word. In an example of a denotative view of the word winter, we might say:

• Winter is the season between fall and spring.

In this direct, straight line view of a word to real world referent, there is a sense of the right word for the right meaning. The referent feels like something "out there" as an object external to us, the users of the word.

We start to run into some difficulties, however, when we try to come up with a definition for blue. We often end up not so much defining it as giving examples of other things that display it. So we might say something like, "Blue is the color of the sky on a sunny day." Thus, we start to lose the direct mapping of the word blue to its referent and create an indirect connection via another thing that carries the actual thing.

Componential Analysis

Componential analysis likewise refers to a way to describe the relationship of a word to its referent. However, rather than just providing an objective definition of a word, componential analysis seeks to identify the essential set of features of the referent. It was originally inspired by the way phoneticians could identify the essential features of a sound, which can be described with almost binary labels, like [+voicing] and [-voicing].

Componential analysis might describe the referent of the words woman and man in these ways:

• woman – [+human] [+adult] [+female]
• man – [+human] [+adult] [-female]

This seems like a fairly reasonable approach, and it also seems somewhat like denotation, for we could simply say, a woman is an adult human female, and a man is an adult human male. However, the usefulness breaks down when presented with words like winter or blue.

We might begin with saying, "Winter is a season, so that makes it [+season]." But then where are we to go? How do we differentiate between winter and the other three seasons? Do we say that it is cold, too, so we need to add [+cold]. But what are spring and autumn, then? Are they [+cold] or [-cold]? And how about something like blue? We can say it is [+color], but then what? Is it then non-every-other-color?

• winter – [+season][+cold] ??????
• blue – [+color] ????????

Again, as with denotation, we begin to lose our way. However, even though denotation and componential analysis don’t zero in on the meaning of a word as directly as we think they do, such explanations can be helpful for setting the boundaries of a word, and we use these sometimes successful direct techniques quite a lot. In fact, we tend to think that these are the ways that words are related to their referents.

However, we don't have to go very far to see that the direct connection of word is not the way a word is connected to its referent, but is only sometimes one way that the connection is made. We have already seen the failure of denotation and componential analysis to help define blue, and even for something as seemingly straightforward as woman, we run into problems when presented with a sentence such as:

• That woman is a cow.

Metaphor Theory

Most readers will readily recognize the sentence above as a metaphor. The existence of metaphors underscores the fact we have just been glimpsing until now: words do not map directly onto their real world referents. If they did, metaphors would not exist. There would be no possibility for any native speaker of English to say, "That woman is a cow," and have it accepted as normal and meaningful by other native speakers of English.

However, while metaphors show that words do not relate directly to the real world, nevertheless, there remains a connection to the real world. In fact, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson posit that metaphor is the basic system for meaning in human language. That is, they claim that meaning begins as the connection of a word to the real world and then the word is extended to the abstract world, becoming symbolic, via metaphor. Let's look more closely at metaphor and Lakoff and Johnson's theory.

You may recall from earlier classes that a metaphor is a type of comparison that doesn't use like or as. The comparison is direct. Thus, saying "A woman is like a cow" is not a metaphor, but saying "A woman is a cow" is a metaphor.

In a more linguistic explanation, we might say that words refer to real world objects, and when we look at the essential features of any two objects (i.e., use componential analysis) and discover that the two words share essential features, we can use the second word in place of the first.

Think of our example metaphor again: That woman is a cow. What does this mean?

So the only difference is that a cow is not human and a woman is.
Since a woman and a cow share at least one feature, one can serve as a metaphor for the other.

Can we say, That man’s a cow?

It doesn’t work as well, does it? But it’s still somewhat acceptable because there is still one feature that is shared: adult.

And so the metaphor she/he is a cow comes to mean large because the key feature of an adult is that it is a full-grown individual, a feature of size.

The basis of Lakoff and Johnson's metaphor theory, then, is this: All words have their basis in the concrete world, and all abstract thought is the result of extending the concrete into the abstract through metaphor.

Lakoff and Johnson suggest some examples:

• Conscious is up; unconscious is down.
  
• We get up, wake up, stay up, rise and shine.
  
• We fall asleep, sink into a coma, drop off to sleep, and go under in hypnosis or anesthesia.

While metaphor theory seems quite plausible, some difficulties still remain. Can all thought really be traced back to the concrete world? Do all words have origins in the real world? What about the word unicorn? Unicorns do not exist and never have, so what does the word refer to?