ABSTRACT
In the previous two chapters we have considered two kinds of meaning relation that words enter into. One, the referential or denotational relation, concerns the relation between words and our experience of the world, what we want to talk about. The other, sense relations and in particular the relations of synonymy and antonymy, concerns the relations that words contract with each other in the meaning systems of the vocabulary of the language. Neither kind of relation by itself exhausts what we can say about the meaning of a word, and the meaning relations are not entirely independent of each other either. Synonymy after all is about sameness of reference, and discussion of the reference of a lexeme cannot be undertaken in isolation from the consideration of semantically related lexemes.
