15.

Denotation and connotation

Denotation and connotation are associated with the work of a French literary
theorist Roland Barthes, developed in his influential books 'Elements of Semiology and
Mythologies'.
Denotation refers to the literal, or primary, meaning of a sign, its exact definition.
For example, the word home refers to the place where you live—it could be a house, an
apartment, etc. This is the word’s denotation.
Connotation refers to the added, or secondary, meanings that have become
attached to a sign through its repeated use in particular contexts. The
word connotation is commonly used in the phrases positive connotation and negative
connotation. That’s because people associate good or bad things with a lot of words. For
many people, the word home has a positive connotation—it’s associated with safety,
comfort, and a sense of belonging. These associations and implications make up the
word’s connotation. It reflects the artistic or creative aspects of language: how we use
language to evoke images and sensations by showing analogies or similarities between
different objects.
The connotation of a word depends on cultural context and personal associations,
but the denotation of a word is its standardized meaning within the language. Another
way to think about it is that a word’s denotation is the same or about the same for most
people. When you say “bicycle,” other English speakers generally know what you’re
talking about. Some may picture a mountain bike while others picture a road bike, but
they’re thinking about the same general thing. While a word’s connotation may be
widely shared, different words often have different connotations for different people.
Examples: Take the noun aroma. The denotation of aroma in “the aroma of
coffee” is basically “smell”: the characteristic of something you perceive with your
nose. But the connotation of aroma is typically “a pleasant and pervasive smell.” People
generally apply the word aroma to coffee only if they like the smell.
Sometimes words that look similar and share a denotation have strikingly different
connotations. Consider childlike and childish. Both have a basic denotation of
“resembling a child.” But where childlike has connotations of innocence, trust,
simplicity, and candidness, childish has connotations of immaturity and lack of poise.
Describing an adult as “childlike” is very different from describing that person as
“childish.”