referential
/ˌrɛfəˈrɛnʃ(ə)l
/adjective
1Containing or of the nature of references or allusions.As both message and context, nature can manifest the referential function....
- Shades of Mahler and Shostakovich flit through the texture in which dissonances set against a tonally referential idiom and allusions to earlier styles are set within absolute musical structures.
- The map is a referential structure; inside a coordinate system all can be referenced laying the gridwork for reality.
2 Linguistics Relating to a referent, in particular having the external world rather than a text or language as a referent.K. Anthony Appiah argues that racial ascriptions are problematic whether one adopts an ideational or a referential theory of language....
- In language, the words we deal with do have referential meaning which extends beyond this closed logical system.
- Now, everyone seems to agree about where the basic referential morphemes here come from.
Derivatives
referentiality
- She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality.
- The point of deconstruction was that language, by its nature, escapes pure referentiality; it was never that the things language tries to refer to do not exist.
- The more particular criticism seems to be that the referentiality is something that panders to the intelligence of the audience, that falsely congratulates them on being so well-informed.
referentially
- Certainly, an introductory survey needs to account for these texts, summarise their content and aims, and use them referentially as an argument progresses.
- Logophoric pronouns are semantically stronger than regular pronouns in that syntactically, they usually require to be bound in a local domain, and semantically, they are canonically referentially dependent.
- On the other hand the reference value might be referentially atomic, meaning that it has no particular internal structural relation to any other reference values; maybe it is used as an index in an association list.