| 释义 |
referent, n. (and a.)|ˈrɛfərənt|
[ad. L. referent-em, pres. pple. of referre to refer.]
1. One who is referred to or consulted.
1844J. Cairns Let. in Life ix. (1895) 205, I have indeed lost a friend and theological referent of the highest order. 1921Contemp. Rev. Mar. 315 The whole administration is conducted by the provincial government in Bratislava (Pressburg), under the Minister for Slovakia and his thirteen ‘Referents’ or State Secretaries.
2. Gram.
a. A word referring to another. Also as adj. referring, containing a reference.
1899R. C. Temple Univ. Gram. 35 This relation may be expressed..by the addition of referent words expressing it, or referents. A referent word may express the inter-relation of connected sentences by conjoining them [etc.]... Referents are therefore conjunctors or substitutes.
b. That to which something has reference; spec. that which is referred to by a word or expression. Also in Comb. (appositively), as referent-object.
1923Ogden & Richards Meaning of Meaning i. 13 The word ‘thing’ is unsuitable for the analysis here undertaken, because in popular usage it is restricted to material substances—a fact which has led philosophers to favour the terms ‘entity’, ‘ens’ or ‘object’ as the general name for whatever is. It has seemed desirable, therefore, to introduce a technical term to stand for whatever we may be thinking of or referring to. ‘Object’, though this is its original use, has had an unfortunate history. The word ‘referent’, therefore, has been adopted. 1931F. C. S. Northrop Sci. & First Principles ii. 49 This theory [sc. the physical theory of nature] is untenable unless there is a referent for atomicity and motion in something other than the microscopic particles. 1937Harper's Monthly Mag. Dec. 49/2 Knowledge about technological unemployment..is not advanced by the syllogisms of classical economists. The classicists treat the term as a thing-in-itself without finding the referents which give it meaning. 1938Mod. Lang. Rev. Oct. 547 The reinterpretation of the term [baroque] has sprung, not..from the feeling that it could be better applied to some other type of art, but from the revaluation of its original referent. 1950Papers Mich. Acad. Sci., Arts & Lett. XXXVI. 323 The same question may..be phrased by asking how to bridge the gap between..sign and referent. 1958S. Stubelius Airship, Aeroplane, Aircraft 7 As a rule, there has been no difficulty in ascertaining the referents in my linguistic material, with the aid of context. 1964Eng. Stud. XLV. 385 Gender distinctions had always been functional in English as indicating either the sex of the referent or the non-significance of sex-distinction of the referent. 1964Language XL. 229 The much-studied relations of words to their referent-objects. 1968[see denotatum]. 1970New Society 5 Mar. 394/2 Clearly, if the ongon is to have any meaning at all, there must be some way of knowing at what level the symbols are to be interpreted, bearing in mind that each drawing or material object will have several referents. 1973Times Lit. Suppl. 26 Oct. 1306/3 Canada often provides the landscape for his fable or the referents of his argument. 1976Archivum Linguisticum VII. 17 Most Castilian loanwords from other languages have been borrowed to refer to referents, or fulfil functions, when Latin had originally an apparently good word for the same purpose. 1979Dædalus Summer 97 ‘Official’ discourse is reproached for being without a referent in psychic or social reality.
3. Logic. Any member of the class of all terms bearing a given relation to any term. (The correlative of relatum.)
1903[see domain n. 4 f]. 1933L. S. Stebbing Mod. Introd. Logic (ed. 2) vii. 111 Every relational proposition has a converse, which consists in interchanging the terms with, or without, a change in the relation asserted to hold between them. The term from which the relation proceeds is called the referent; the term to which it proceeds is called the relatum. 1947H. Reichenbach Elem. Symbolic Logic iii. 115 There will be more than one relatum with respect to Peter if Peter has other children... The class of referents is also called the domain of function, and the class of relata is called the converse domain. 1967R. A. George tr. Carnap's Logical Struct. of World iii. 60 A relation extension is called one-many if, for each relatum, there exists only one referent. |