Connotative Meaning

More of what is distinctive about conceptual meaning will appear when we contrast it with connotative meaning. Connotative meaning is the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. To a large extent, the notion of reference overlaps with conceptual meaning. If the word woman is defined conceptually by three features (+human, –male, +adult), then the three properties ‘human’, ‘adult’, and ‘female’ must provide a criterion of the correct use of that word. These contrastive features, translated into real world terms, become attributes of the referent (that which the word refers to). But there is a multitude of additional, non-criterial properties that we have learnt to expect a referent of woman to possess. They include not only physical characteristics (‘biped’, ‘having a womb’), but also psychological and social properties (‘gregarious’, ‘subject to material instinct’), and may extend to features which are merely typical ratherthan invariable concomitants of womanhood (‘capable of speech’, ‘experienced in cookery’, ‘shirt-or-dress-wearing’). Still further, connotative meaning can embrace the ‘putative properties’ of the referent, due to the viewpoint adopted by an individual, or a group of people or a whole society. So in the past woman has been burdened with such attributes (‘frail’, ‘prone to tears’, ‘cowardly’, ‘emotional’, ‘irrational’, ‘inconstant’) as the dominant male has been pleased to impose on her, as well as with more becoming qualities as ‘gentle’, ‘compassionate’, ‘sensitive’, ‘hard-working’. Obviously, connotations are apt to vary from age to age and from society to society. A hundred years ago, ‘non-trouser-wearing’ must have seemed a thoroughly definitive connotation of the word woman and its translation equivalents in European languages, just as in many non-western societies today womankind is associated with attributes foreign to our own way of thinking. It is equally obvious that connotations will vary, to some extent, from individual to individual within the same speech community: to an English-speaking misogynist woman will have many incomplimentary associations not present in the minds of speakers of a more feminist persuasion.

It will be clear that in talking about connotation, I am in fact talking about the real world experience one associates with an expression when one uses or hears it. Therefore the boundary between conceptual and connotative meaning is coincident with that nebulous but crucial boundary [...] between language and the real world. In confirmation of the feeling that connotation is somehow incidental to language rather than an essential part of it, we may notice that connotative meaning is not specific to language, but is shared by other communicative systems, such as visual art and music. Whatever connotations the word baby has can be conjured up (more effectively, because the medium is directly representational) by a drawing of a baby, or an imitation of a baby’s cry. The overlap between linguistic and visual connotations is particularly noticeable in advertising, where words are often the lesser patterns of illustrations in the task of conferring on a product a halo of favourable associations.

A second fact which indicates that connotative meaning is peripheral compared with conceptual meaning is that connotations are relatively unstable: that is, they vary considerably, as we have seen, according to culture, historical period, and the experience of the individual. Although it is too simple to suggest that all speakers of a particular language speak exactly the same language, it can be assumed, as a principle without which communication through that language would not be possible, that on the whole they share the same conceptual framework, just as they share approximately the same syntax. In fact, many semanticists today assume that the same basic conceptual framework is common to all languages, and is a universal property of a human mind.

Thirdly, connotative meaning is indeterminate and open-ended in a sense in which conceptual meaning is not. Connotative meaning is open-ended in the same way as our knowledge and beliefs about the universe are open-ended: any characteristic of the referent, identified subjectively or objectively, may contribute to the connotative meaning of the expression which denotes it. In contrast, it is taken as fundamental by anyone who studies conceptual meaning that the meaning of a word or sentence can be codified in terms of a limited set of symbols (e. g. in the form of a finite set of discrete features of meaning), and that the semantic representation of a sentence can be specified by means of a finite number of rules. This postulate of the finiteness and determinateness of conceptual content is not arbitrary, but is modelled on the assumption that linguists generally make when analysing other aspects of linguistic structure. Without such assumptions, one can scarcely attempt to describe language as a coherent system at all.