Denotative Meaning

10 Key excerpts on "Denotative Meaning"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Thinking Arabic Translation

  A Course in Translation Method: Arabic to English

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

    (Publisher)

  7 Denotative Meaning and translation issues 7.1 Denotative Meaning In this chapter and the next one, we shall consider the two basic aspects of the semantic matrix of language: Denotative Meaning and connotative meaning. Translation is concerned with meaning. But, as has already become very clear, the term ‘meaning’ is elastic and indeterminate, especially when applied to a whole text. This is true even of Denotative Meaning (also known as cognitive , proposi-tional or literal meaning). Denotative Meaning is that kind of meaning that relates directly to the range of ‘things’ (whether physical, emotional or more abstract) that are conventionally referred to by a word or phrase in a particular sense. Thus, the fact that ‘window’ by convention refers to a particular kind of aperture in a wall or roof is a matter of Denotative Meaning. In the case of words, it is Denotative Meanings that are the central feature of dictionary de fi nitions. In fact, words may, and typically do, have more than one Denotative Meaning. The situation in which a word has more than one different and distinct Denotative Meaning – or, more technically, more than one sense – is known as polysemy. Polysemy can be illustrated by the word plain, which means (i) ‘clear’ (as in ‘a plain sky’), (ii) ‘unadorned’ (as in ‘a plain paper bag’) and (iii) ‘obvious’ (as in ‘it’s a plain case of forgery’). There are sometimes problems in deciding between cases where two uses of a word represent more than one sense – that is, cases of polysemy – and where the two uses in question are merely ‘variants’ of a single overall sense. These need not, however, concern us here, as they are not typically of great importance for translation. There are also problems in deciding between what constitutes two senses of a single word and cases where two words happen to sound the same.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  From the Tree to the Labyrinth

  Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

  • Umberto Eco, Anthony Oldcorn(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  9 Toward a History of Denotation

  Denotation (along with its counterpart, connotation ) is considered, depending on the context, as either a characteristic or a function (i) of individual terms (what does the word “dog” denote?); (ii) of declarative propositions (the sentence “the dog barks” may denote a state of the world, that there is a dog barking—but, if “the dog” is taken as denoting a species—all dogs, that is—then it could denote a characteristic common to the entire canine race); (iii) of nominal phrases and definite descriptions (the phrase “the President of the Republic” may denote, depending on the context and the circumstances of its utterance, either the actual president currently in power or the role provided for in a constitution). In each of these cases we must decide whether the denotation has to do with the meaning, the referent, or the act of reference. To sum up, by denotation do we mean what is signified by the term, the thing named, or, in the case of propositions, what is the case or what is believed to be the case, inasmuch as it forms the content of a proposition?

  For structural linguists, “denotation” is concerned with meaning. For Hjelmslev (1943) the difference between a denotative semiotic and a connotative semiotic lies in the fact that the former is a semiotic whose expression plane is not a semiotic, whereas the latter is a semiotic whose expression plane is a semiotic. Barthes (1964) too formulates his position basing himself on Hjelmslev and develops a fully intensional idea of denotation, according to which, between a signifier and a first (or zero) degree signified, there is always a denotative relationship.

  In componential analysis, the term has been used to indicate the sense-relationship expressed by a lexical term—such as the term “uncle,” which expresses the relationship “father’s brother” (see, for instance, Leech 1974: 238). In other words, in structuralist circles, denotation, referring back to Frege’s (1892) distinction, is closer to Sinn than to Bedeutung,

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  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.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Connotation and Meaning

  • Beatriz Garza-Cuarón, Charlotte Broad(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Thus, connotation is the relation of one term to other terms. This is a formal definition: anything connoted by a term is always an expression. Every definition is an explanation of the connotation of a term. Carnap (1970:64) disagrees with Lewis's inclusion of the term comprehension, because it would require an extremely complicated formal language and, in any case, this distinction should be made with respect to intensions, not to things. Once Camap realises that it is impossible to reduce language to a calculus,^'' he discusses certain aspects of semantics and even of 'prag-matics'.^^ Katz (1966:48-50) points out that Camap shows in Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modern Logic (1956) his awareness of the need for a logic of meaning and formulates a modal logic in which he combines his thesis of extensionality, to which he had formerly adhered exclusively, with a thesis of intensionality. The The Antithetical Pair Denotation-Connotation 81 semantics of a language now should embrace rules of syntax, of designa-tion, and of truth-value. The rules of designation laid down by Camap (1970a: 6-7) are of great Import in the study of connotation: I propose to use the term designator for all those expressions to which a semantical analysis of meaning is applied, the class of designators thus being narrower or wider according to the method of analysis used. His understanding of meaning is exclusively referentiai and cognitive, and he analyses it in sentences (excluding all but declarative sentences), expressions, predicative phrases, and individual expressions; in other words, these units may be designators,^^ as Camap (1970a:6-7) explains: The Word 'meaning' is here always understood in the sense of designative meaning, sometimes also called 'cognitive', 'theoretical', 'referentiai', or 'in-formative', as distinguished from other meaning components, e.g., emotive or motivative meaning. Thus here we have to do only with declarative sentences and their parts.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Word Meaning and Legal Interpretation

  An Introductory Guide

  • Christopher Mark Hutton(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  PART I Meaning and Interpretation 7 CHAPTER 1 Linguistic Meaning The discussion below reviews in brief approaches to the study of linguistic meaning or semantics . The word meaning is notoriously difficult to define (Ogden and Richards, 1923), as is the word word itself (Hanks, 2013: 25ff.). There is little agreement about the questions to be asked, let alone the answers (Stout, 1982), and the student is confronted by a bewildering array of termi-nology and frameworks. Two points should however be kept in mind. First, there is an underlying ideal of one word–one meaning , to which at some level every theory of meaning is responding. Secondly, each language user has the extensive resources of his or her linguistic and interpretative experience on which to draw. Basic terms and concepts The term linguistic meaning implies that there are particular properties that words (phrases, sentences, etc.) possess and by virtue of which they function as signs. One common way to explain the meaning of a word ( lexical meaning ) is by the identification of a synonym , that is, a word with the same or a similar meaning. Synonyms are used, for example, when an unfamiliar or difficult word is explained with reference to a familiar one. A student of Latin who looks up arbor in a Latin–English dictionary will find it defined or glossed as ‘tree’. If we look up unctuous in a monolin-gual English dictionary, we find that it means ‘oily, greasy’ and that it can be applied to people, with the implication that they are smooth-talking, affected, insincere and untrustworthy. In these cases the dictionary explains the less familiar by reference to the more familiar. However, basic words such as oily , and even simple words such as mouse , the and in , also appear in standard dictionaries, and have to be explained with reference to less basic or more difficult words.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Linguistics for Translators

  • Ali Almanna, Juliane House(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Semantics

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003228028-7

  This chapter is an introduction to semantics and its main areas and concepts. It discusses such areas and notions as ‘denotation’ versus ‘connotation’, ‘signifier’ versus ‘signified’, ‘reference’ versus ‘sense’, ‘compositional meaning’ versus ‘unitary meaning’, ‘lexical relations’, ‘semantic roles’, ‘semantic principles’, and ‘frame semantics’ in a direct link to translation.

  After studying this chapter, you should be able to (1) identify semantic roles and verb-specific semantic roles assigned to each noun phrase; (2) identify ‘supplementary features’ and ‘diagnostic features’; (3) identify the different relationships that a word has with other words; (4) differentiate between ‘compositional meaning’ and ‘unitary meaning’; (5) differentiate between ‘connotative meaning’ and ‘Denotative Meaning’; and (6) differentiate between ‘generalization’ and ‘particularization’.

  Semantics is one of the branches of linguistics that refers to the study of the meaning of linguistic units, such as morphemes, words, expressions, phrases, and so on. For example, ‘to buy’ and ‘to purchase’ technically refer to the same thing, but semanticians try to analyse any shade of meaning that they might have. Unlike pragmatics, semantics concentrates on “what the words conventionally mean, rather than on what a speaker might want the words to mean on a particular occasion” (Yule 1985/1996 : 114). In semantics, several notions can be studied, such as ‘signifier’ versus ‘signified’, ‘reference’ versus ‘sense’, ‘denotation’ versus ‘connotation’, ‘semantic principles’, and ‘semantic roles’ (for more details, see Almanna 2016 )

  Signifier versus signified

  What is conjured up in your own mind when you hear the word ‘Muslim’?

  Each sign is made up of two main components, namely ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. While the signifier is the physical form of the sign that can be seen, smelt, tasted, touched, heard, etc., the signified is what is conjured up in one’s mind while seeing, touching, hearing, or tasting something (cf. Bazzi 2009 : 16; Farghal and Almanna 2015 : 128; Almanna and Al-Shehari 2019 : 16). To explain, the word ‘dog’

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  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.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Manual of lexicography

  • Ladislav Zgusta, Vera Cerny(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  It will be useful to discern the following main components of lexical meaning: (1) the designation, 11 (2) the connotation, and (possibly) (3) the range of application. 1.3.1 By the term designation we mean above all the relations existing between the single words and the single parts of the extralinguistic world, as conceived by the speakers of a language. It will be easy to understand that such a word as book has a relation to a type of material objects of the extralinguistic world. The thing itself, or, more precisely, the class of things to which the word has this type of relation is often called the denotatum. 12 The denotata will, then, be the classes of things in the extralinguistic world we speak about. It should be understood that not only things of the material, physically existing world are denotata of words. Any speaker of English will feel that a real, really existing quality of an object is the denotatum of the word big. In the same way, he will feel that a really existing action of a subject is the denotatum of the werb to run. 13 11 What we term designation is frequently called denotation. We choose the first term (after a discussion with U. Weinreich (precisely because in the majority of cases, the lexicographer is more concerned with the designata than with the denotata. — Cf. Horalek, Filosofie jazyka (Acta Universitatis Carolinae philologica, monographia XV, Praha 1967), p. 79 for a good dis-cussion of the pertinent concepts and terms, broader than the present one; I do not mention the single points of agreement, nor those of disagreement. 12 Semantic terminology shows the same lack of unification as linguistic terminology generally. Different scholars use different terms. Very often, the student will meet the terms thing-meant, referent, referend and others, used approximatively in the value of denotatum.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Introduction to English Linguistics

  • Ingo Plag, Sabine Arndt-Lappe, Maria Braun, Mareile Schramm(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  5 The meaning of words and sentences: semantics

  5.1Introduction

  Semantics is the study of the structure of meaning. To us as speakers of a language, the idea that language is used to communicate meaning seems intuitively quite straightforward. However, we will see in this chapter that, if we look at how meaning is actually encoded in language, things are much more complex than they seem. First of all we may wonder what meaning is in the first place. This question will be discussed in section 5.2 . Secondly, we may wonder which linguistic units are relevant for meaning, and we will look at this question in section 5.3 . Section 5.4 . will then be concerned in more detail with the ways in which meaning is organised in language. As an example, we will deal with the organisation of word meaning in the speaker’s mind.

  5.2What does ‘meaning’ mean? Words, concepts and referents

  In contrast to maybe other linguistic structures, we are quite used to consciously dealing with semantic issues in everyday life. The linguistic unit with which we tend to associate meaning is the word. When we meet a word in a language that is unknown to us, we may consult a dictionary in order to find out about its meaning. Imagine, for example, you came across the word box , and you did not know what it meant. In (1) you find an extract from what the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English will tell you about the meaning of box .

  (1) Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, s.v. box

  a. A definition in English:‘a container for putting things in, especially one with four stiff straight sides’ b. Six pictures:

  (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2003), printed with permission)

  In how far can this definition and these pictures tell us something about what meaning is to speakers of a language? We can draw an analogy between the dictionary entry and the way in which language organises meaning.

  The word box itself is a combination of four sounds: [b], [ ], [k] and [s]. This combination is arbitrary in the sense that there is nothing special about this sequence of sounds that would make them particularly suitable to be used to refer to box-like objects. For example, we may take three of those sounds, put them in a different order, and arrive at a completely different word that has absolutely nothing to do with boxes: sock ([s] + [

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Language and Thought

  Anthropological Issues

  • William C. McCormack, Stephen A. Wurm(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  These things may or may not be relevant in defining the meaning of each individual linguistic item. A general definition of linguistic meaning, however, must be made in broader terms, over and above these con-tingent circumstances. Perhaps we can approach the problem of the definition of meaning in a profitable way by analyzing what is involved when we say that an ideal speaker knows the meaning of a linguistic item. Take the case of a man who is thrown into a society whose language he does not know. At first, although he may well understand that some sort of linguistic communication is going on around him among the native members of the society, he does not understand what is being meant by the linguistic expressions that he hears. He does not even understand which sequences of sounds are the units that carry meaning in that language. In short, he does NOT KNOW THE MEANINGS of the linguistic items used by the native members. He may, however, get used to their language bit by bit and, after a certain period of time, may reach a stage where he not only can understand it but also use it himself in a way that is understandable to the natives. He now KNOWS THE MEANINGS of the linguistic items in the language. Now when is it that we can say that he KNOWS THE MEANING of a certain linguistic item? Suppose the linguistic item in question is the English word boy (in its most usual sense). He cannot be said to know the meaning of the word if he applies the word to a female child, an old male, or a puppy or kitten. If he does so, he is said to use the word incorrectly. The possibility of judging his linguistic behavior in terms of being correct or incorrect implies that meaning is something that lies behind the whole rule-governed activity called language. Thus meaning, like syntax, which is far better studied as a systematized

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book