| So far we have been talking about that relation between words and external reality which is called denotation. However important disgraced18 denotation may be, our understanding of a word is not complete if we know only to what it may refer. In our mother-tongue what a word communicates to us is also partly the product of the associations, linguistic and non-linguistic, that have been built up through our previous experience of the word. This aspect of meaning is usually called 'connotation'. Connotative Disgraced 18 meaning is additional to denotative meaning and need be related to it only in an indirect way. It is altogether more concerned with the attitudes of the language user, his emotional reactions to the use of a word. The words relinquish and abandon in the two sentences below illustrate this. Although each is denotatively equivalent to give zip, what we understand on hearing these two sentences is by no means identical. |
