THE TRIANGLE OF REFERENCE by Ogden and Richards

The Triangle of Reference 

The Triangle of Reference (also known as the Triangle of Meaning) is a model of how linguistic symbols are related to the objects they represent. The triangle was published in The Meaning of Meaning (1923) by Ogden and Richards.

The Semantic Triangle of Meaning has three parts. Symbol, Reference (Thought), and Referent.

-         - A Symbol is an item used to represent other things, ideas, or events (2013, p. 178).

-         - A Reference is the initial thought you have associated with a word.

-         - A Referent is the actual meaning of the word

In order to illustrate his point that there is a direct relationship between symbols and thought, Ogden and Richards created the “Semantic Triangle.” The triangle is a simple model in which the three factors involved with the statement or idea are placed in the corners and the relationships between them are represented by the sides. An example of how this idea works is as follow:
 

WHO ARE YOU, SEMANTICS?

SEMANTICS OH SEMANTICS..........

Semantics is a branch of linguistics which relates with meaning. Semantics is considered as a study of meaning in language. It deals with the expression of linguistic objects such as word, phrases and sentences. It does not pay attention to the syntactical arrangement or pronounciation of linguistic object. As states by Katz (1972 : 1), “Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It is concered with what sentence and other linguistics object express, not with the arrangement with their syntactic parts or with their pronounciation.”