Connotative Meaning

6 Key excerpts on "Connotative Meaning"

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  Thinking Arabic Translation

  A Course in Translation Method: Arabic to English

  • James Dickins, Sándor Hervey, Ian Higgins(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 Connotative Meaning and translation issues 8.1 Basic principles Denotative meaning as discussed in Chapter 7 is only one aspect of verbal meaning. The meaning of a text comprises several different layers: referential content, emotional colouring, cultural associations, social and personal conno-tations and so on. The many-layered nature of meaning is something translators must never forget. Even within a single language, synonyms are usually different in their overall semantic effects – compare ‘clergyman’ and ‘sky pilot’, ‘adder’ and ‘viper’, ‘go away’ and ‘piss off’, etc. Each of these expressions has overtones that differentiate it from its synonym. We shall call such overtones ‘Connotative Meanings’ – that is, associations that, over and above the denotative meaning of an expression, form part of its overall meaning. In fact, of course, Connotative Meanings are many and varied, and it is common for a single piece of text, or even a single expression, to combine more than one kind into a single overall effect. However, it is useful at this stage to distinguish six major types of Connotative Meaning, because learning to identify them sharpens students’ awareness of the presence and signi fi cance of connotations in STs and TTs alike. Note that, by de fi nition, we are only concerned here with socially widespread connotations, not personal ones. Only in exceptional circumstances do translators allow personal connotations to in fl uence a TT. 8.2 Attitudinal meaning Attitudinal meaning is that part of the overall meaning of an expression that con-sists of some widespread attitude to the referent. The expression does not merely denote the referent in a neutral way but also hints at some attitude to it. So, for instance, in appropriate contexts, ‘the police’, ‘the fi lth’ and ‘the boys in blue’ are synonyms in terms of denotative content, but they have different overall meanings.

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  Toward a Theory of Context in Linguistics and Literature

  Proceedings of a Conference of the Kelemen Mikes Hungarian Cultural Society, Maastricht, September 21–25, 1971

  • Addam Makkai(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  All this is still quite far from that sense of connotation which I attempted to approach above by using the words overtone or mood. It seems it is primarily the linguists who are responsible for the difference in use of the word connota-tion as it is used in logic and in linguistics. It was Bloomfield who, among modern linguists, used the term 'connotation' for the first time in his book Language THE PROBLEMS OF CONNOTATION 165 (1933, Chapter 9) in three different senses whose common feature is that they have to do with the secondary, deri-ved senses of words: thus, according to Bloomfield, next to the base-meaning of a word we find its connotative mean-ing whose three types are (a) the given linguistic level, meaning the various usages of the different social classes, dialects, foreign words, 'elegant' words, argot, etc. (2) linguistic taboo and its various manifestations; and (3) linguistic elements expressing intensity such as exclamations, swear-words, onomatopoeia, words of baby language, nick-names and endearments, etc. Still inexplicitly, the notion of connotation can already be found in de Saussure, actually in a double sense. According to Saussure's classic definition of the linguistic sign, we have an acoustic image of, say, some sort of a house, and as the signifier of this signified notion, the sound string /haws/. This connection, however, is multiguous, since there is no way to predict just what sort of a house will appear in a person's consciousness if he hears the sound-string /haws/. It follows that we are dealing with a powerful abstraction; for the image we try to abstract from our practically innumer-able real life experiences has all the characteristic features which 'belong' to the basic concept. This, however, is no guarantee that the image will always be the same for every-body; after all, a person may have pleasant or unpleasant psychological associations in connection with the basic notion 'house'.

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  Discourse in Translation

  • Said Faiq(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7

  Types of Connotative Meaning, and their significance for translation James Dickins

  Denotative vs. Connotative Meaning

  This chapter operates with a basic distinction between denotative and Connotative Meaning. Denotative meaning involves the overall range, in a particular sense, of an expression – word, multi-word unit, or syntactic structure. A ‘syntactic structure’ is defined to include the words involved in that structure, not just the abstracted structural relations. Thus, in relation to a ‘parse-tree’ approach, a syntactic structure under this definition goes beyond the nodes (terminal and non-terminal) to include the vocabulary items that are attached to terminal nodes. Two expressions in a particular sense that ‘pick out’ the same extensional range of entities in the world – or better, in all possible worlds, real and imaginable – have the same denotative meaning.

  Denotative meaning is also known by other terms: for example, denotational meaning, denotation, propositional meaning and cognitive meaning (Cruse 1986: 45, 271–277). Connotative Meaning, or connotation, is defined here negatively as all kinds of meaning that are not denotative meaning. The denotative meaning of an expression in a particular sense is that kind of meaning which, in the context of a proposition, contributes to the truth-conditions of that proposition (for an extension of these principles to questions and other non-propositions, see Dickins 2010: 1079). There is thus an intimate connection between denotative meaning and truth-conditional semantics.

  Connotative Meaning, as noted, covers all kinds of meanings that are not denotative meaning: meanings that do not involve the extensional range of an expression in a particular sense, minus denotative meaning. There are many types of Connotative Meaning (perhaps an endless number), but in this chapter, 15 are identified as particularly important for their significance for translation. In doing so, the following basic notions are used here to analyse Connotative Meaning.

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  A Componential Analysis of Meaning

  An Introduction to Semantic Structures

  • Eugene A. Nida(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  But the conventional meaning is not as accessible to scientific scrutiny as might appear to be the case. How is the conventional meaning to be determined ? Can it be established by a poll of average users of the language? Or is the conventional meaning ascertainable only by specialists, e.g. lexicographers, logicians, lawyers, etc.? In general these problems of meaning involve primarily the combinations of words, rather than individual lexical units (words and idioms), but a precise determination of the conventional meaning is extremely difficult. Many semantic problems arise because people expect too much of language. They expect words to point unerringly to precise entities within an area of meaning; rather, words are often only designations for an area sometimes delimited largely by negatively defined features, which set it off from other areas, but do not describe all features of all referents contained within an area. Meaning and function in communication Meaning must be understood primarily in terms of the functions performed by various factors in communication. Jakobson's classification of the three basic types of factors and their corre-sponding functions, though somewhat expanded by other scholars, remains basic to an understanding of meaning: 16 referential poetic emotive , . conative phatic metalingual 1Λ See Jakobson 1960. 202 THE NATURE OF REFERENTIAL MEANING The emotive function involves primarily the attitudes of the source, but this function can also be described for certain com-munications as evaluative or appraisive. The focus at this point is upon the role of the source in respect to the communica-tion. The referential function relates to the total context of what is said.

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  Components of the Content Structure of the Word

  • N. G. Komlev(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  These slight nuances may at times lead to misunderstanding between people, or on the other hand, the speaker, knowing the emotional charge of a given word for his interlocutor, may avoid a certain expression or, on the contrary, use it. 29 We encounter cases, most often in poetic texts, in which the connotation of feeling suppresses its LC and by itself assumes primary importance. R. Carnap pointed out that in poetry the words sunshine and clouds do not provide meteorological infor-mation but rather express certain feelings. 30 According to Kron-asser, meaning disappears in swearwords, in which the conceptual part is distorted or lost altogether, while the emotional part is expanded. 31 The emotional component in the lexical concept (or meaning) implies feelings which in varying degrees of intensiveness accom-pany the vocabulary. However, in the so-called expressive voca-bulary feeling is not the connotation but the lexical concept (for example, darling, fool, gawk, and the like). The emotional nuance of this type is the same and common to the entire linguistic com-munity. It appears that the connotation of feeling is also present in nonphonetic forms of communication, in other forms of expression of language (S,); 3 2 in part its elements can apparently be found in the language of deaf-mutes and blind deaf-mutes. 3 3 29 C. Hohoff, Bekenntnis zur neueren Sprachkritik, 389. 3 0 R. Carnap, Philosophy and logical Syntax, 28. See also N. Rudich, The Dialectics of Poesis. 31 Η. Kronasser, Die Bedeutung der Bedeutung, 405. See also L. Kapeller, Das Schimpfbuch; I. Opelt, Die lateinischen Schimpfwörter und verwandte sprachliche Erscheinungen. 32 Ζ. M. Volockaja et al., 2estovaja kommunikacija i ee mesto sredi drugix sistem ieloveceskogo obscenija [Gestural Communication and Its Place Among Other Systems of Human Intercourse]; Ε. Kern, Der Taubstumme, seine Sprache und sein Verhalten; E. Hall, The Silent Language; W. Heinitz, Sprache und Ausdrucksbewegung; T.

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  Thinking Spanish Translation

  A Course in Translation Method: Spanish to English

  • Michael Thompson, Louise Haywood, Sándor Hervey(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9      Connotative Meaning andtranslation problems

       

  As was pointed out in Chapter 8 , literal meaning is only one aspect of textual meaning. Understanding the literal reference conventionally attached to verbal signs is a necessary part of unravelling the complex meaning of a text, but it is not, in itself, enough. In actual fact, the meaning of a text comprises a number of different layers: referential content, emotional colouring, cultural associations, social and personal connotations, and so on. The many-layered nature of meaning is something translators must never forget.

  Even within a single language, so-called referential synonyms are as a rule different in their overall semantic effects. For instance, in contemporary English, ‘homosexual’, ‘queer’ and ‘gay’ must be rated as synonyms in terms of referential content, but they clearly have different overall meanings. This is because, while ‘homosexual’ is a neutral expression, ‘queer’ is often understood to carry pejorative overtones, and ‘gay’ meliorative ones. These overtones are not part of literal meaning, but it is evident that to refer to someone as ‘queer’ could be taken as hostile in a way that the designations ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’ could not. However, in academic and cultural contexts ‘queer’ has been rehabilitated. It is impossible to ignore such overtones in responding to messages in one's own language, and one certainly cannot afford to overlook them when it comes to translating. For example, a speaker who refers to a man as ‘un maricón’ or ‘una loca’ does not merely designate a person with certain sexual preferences, but also conveys a certain attitude to him. Consequently, while translating ‘maricón’ as ‘homosexual’ would accurately render the literal meaning of the ST, it would fail to render the denigrating attitude connoted by ‘maricón’ (better translated as ‘queer’ or ‘pansy’). Conversely, translating a reference to a man as ‘una loca’ denotatively as ‘mad’ entirely loses its connection with homosexual identity (‘queen’ would be a better option).

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