The Limitation of the language system is that signs do not refer by themselves to the world. A sign has a distinctive existence by its part being different from any other corresponding part of other signs. Signs may then be said to have a distinctive meaning, but this meaning is enclosed in the language system. According to Benveniste (1974), what makes meaningful dialogue possible when communication is an exchange of signs, is the ability of sentences to refer to a world.
> With semantics we enter the specific mode of meaning caused by the discourse. The problems raised here are related to the language as producer of messages. A message cannot be reduced to a succession of units, which are identified separately; it is not an accumulation of signs, which create meaning. On the contrary it is the meaning (the "intended"), globally conceived, which realizes and divides itself in distinctive "signs," which are words. Furthermore, semantics govern necessarily the totality of referents, whereas semiotics in principle is precluded from and is independent of all references. The semantic order is identical to the world of enunciation and the world of discourse. (Benveniste, 1974, p. 64)
Sentences are more than a simple aggregation of signs; a semantic structure is added that makes the sentence able to refer to the speaker, the listener, the temporal situation (the "now"), and the situation. Ricœur called these references *ostensive*, as they are references rooted in the situatedness of the discourse. There is no doubt about who the "me" in an utterance in a discourse is, because the utterer is present in the situation.
The ability of sentences to refer to the world is dialectically connected to the meaning of the sentence. By ostensive references the sentence is able to point out objects in the context and thereby say something about them. The sentences are meaningful by being able to say something about something.
At this point, Ricœur substituted the Saussurian *parole* with the term *discourse*. Where *parole* is as a simple instance of diachronic application […] p. 108