Metalanguage query
From: | Jonathan Knibb <j_knibb@...> |
Date: | Sunday, January 25, 2004, 22:08 |
Forgive me if I delurk briefly ...
I've been working on the basic philosophy of my language Telona (anyone
remember it? :) ) and
have come across a concept for which I can't think of an elegant term.
Maybe someone can help?
The first idea is that a word or phrase within an utterance refers to a
specific entity at a specific
time, and I'm using the word 'referent' to denote the
entity-at-a-specific-time which is being
referred to. But the same word or phrase in another context could be
associated with a different
referent - the word 'house' can mean my house now, your house now, your
house a year ago,
etc. The concept I need to verbalise is, for any given word or phrase, *the
set of all its possible
referents*.
I'm thinking maybe something based on 'describe', but ... 'descriptum'?
'Describend'?
'Descript' (ugh)? Or is there something obvious I'm missing?
cheers in advance,
Jonathan.
==
emailing from work, so no .sig :)
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