sensesmeanings

Sensesmeanings is a term used in linguistic and cognitive discussions to describe the relationship between the sense of a linguistic expression and its meaning. Sense refers to the encoded content or mode of presentation of a word or phrase, while meaning refers to the concept or mental representation it evokes. The term highlights that interpretation depends on both linguistic form and context.

In this view, many language phenomena arise from differences between senses and meanings. Polysemy, for example, uses a single word sense to evoke multiple related meanings; metaphor and metonymy can shift meaning without changing the underlying sense. Context can disambiguate senses or shift meaning entirely.

Sensesmeanings is used across theoretical approaches, including Fregean semantics, cognitive linguistics, and distributional semantics, and it informs analyses in lexicography and natural language processing. It supports methods such as word sense disambiguation, semantic representation, and knowledge-graph construction, where distinguishing sense content from meaning is crucial.

Critics argue that the boundary between sense and meaning is fuzzy and highly context-dependent, and that the term risks oversimplifying interactions among syntax, pragmatics, and world knowledge. Nevertheless, as a framing device, sensesmeanings helps organize discussions about how language encodes content and how listeners derive intended interpretation.

See also: polysemy, Frege’s sense, semantics, pragmatics, word sense disambiguation.