But this isn’t really a contentious assertion. Take the discussion here:
In philosophy of language, a distinction has been proposed by Diego Marconi between two aspects of lexical semantic competence, i.e. inferential and referential competence (Marconi, 1997). One aspect of lexical competence, i.e. inferential competence, is the «ability to deal with the network of semantic relations among lexical units, underlying such performances as semantic inference, paraphrase, definition, retrieval of a word from its definition, finding a synonym, and so forth» (Marconi, 1997, p. 59). For instance, we know that a cat is an animal, we can verbally describe the differences between a cat and a dog, we can recover the word cat from a definition such as The animal that meows, and so on. Such “intralinguistic” abilities are semantic because, in order to exercise them, a speaker must possess an internalized network specifying semantic connections between a given word (e.g., cat) and other words of a natural language (e.g., animal, meow).
The second aspect of lexical competence, i.e. «referential competence», cognitively mediates the relation between words and entities of the world. For example, we have the ability to classify a given perceived object as a cat or to distinguish it from a dog, to recognize and name a picture of a cat, and so on. Clearly, we can speak of referential competence only relative to words that refer to objects, properties or events we can perceive (e.g., cat, red, hot).