Abstract

According to Russell’s famous Gray’s Elegy argument within “On Denoting”, Frege’s distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung is problematic when applied to a denoting phrase like ‘the first line of Gray’s Elegy’, which denotes a linguistic expression: ‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day’. The author shows that Russell’s Gray’s Elegy argument involves imprecision in the use of quotation marks as well as the unwarranted identification of an expression’s meaning with the expression itself.