ABSTRACT
The treatment of reference in linguistics developed historically as the by-product of a long-established logical tradition. Within that tradition, one formulation (admittedly now somewhat of a straw-man; but see Russell, 1905, 1919; Strawson, 1950 or Carnap, 1958) holds that reference (or denotation) is a mapping relation between linguistic terms and entities which exist in the Real World. Therefore, the truth of sentences containing referring expressions depends, inter alia, on whether the referring expressions inside them denote or do not denote in the real world. To illustrate this approach, consider the sentences (1) and (2) below:
The king of France is bald
The queen of England is bald
I rode a unicorn yesterday
I rode a horse yesterday
There is a king of France (and only one)
There is nothing which is both king of France and bald
There is a queen of England (and only one)
There is something which is both queen of England and bald
