Reference serves to connect language with reality and constitutes one of the primary notions in the study of sentence meaning and philosophy of language. Drawing on classical discussions by Russell, Strawson, Donnellan and others, this article proposes the perspective of the “social emergence of reference”. From this perspective, reference enters communicative contexts through sentences; it is shaped by context while also reshaping the nature of context. Thus, reference cannot be grounded solely in the identification of referential objects, but must be understood within a communicative framework in which speaker and hearer construct shared meaning. The article argues that definite and indefinite forms of reference reveal a dual orientation between language and reality: identification and interpretation. Definite reference tends to foreground the identification of objects in reality, whereas indefinite reference often foregrounds the interpretation of sentence meaning and the transmission of knowledge. Only in social activity, and in relation to the communicative purpose of an utterance, can referential meaning emerge. On this basis, the article explains the asymmetry between referential forms and referential objects, clarifies the relation between particularity and generality, and outlines the social regularities governing the use of referential expressions.