On theoretical aspects of english language

Connotational component expresses additional meanings of the word which may be of different types: stylistic, evaluative and emotional, etc. The connotational (connotative) component expresses the attitude of the speaker to what he is saying, to the object denoted by the word. This component consists of emotive connotation and evaluative connotation.

1) Emotive connotation ( = "affective meaning", or an emotive charge), For example, In "a single tree" single states that there is only one tree, but "a lonely tree" besides giving the same information, also renders (conveys) the feeling of sadness.We shouldn't confuse emotive connotations and emotive denotative meanings in which some emotion is named, e.g. horror, love, fear, etc.

2) Evaluative connotation labels the referent as "good" or "bad", For instance notorious has a negative evaluative connotation, while celebrated a positive one: a notorious criminal/liar/ coward, etc. and a celebrated singer/ scholar/ artist, etc. It should be noted that emotive and evaluative connotations are not individual, they are common to all speakers of the language. But emotive implications are individual (or common to a group of speakers), subjective, depend on personal experience.For example,the word "hospital" may evoke all kinds of emotions in different people (an architect, a doctor, an invalid, etc.)

Evaluative connotation expresses positive or negative attitude to the object or phenomenon denoted by the word. It may be rational and emotional. In the latter case we speak of emotive-evaluative connotation. The words brain (“a clever man”), for example, is evaluated as positive, while the word brock (“a scoundrel”), to cheat – have negative connotations,also: notorious – celebrated. Emotional, or emotive connotation of the word is its capacity to evoke and express emotion (duckling, darling (diminutive emotive value)).

Stylistic connotation shows the stylistic status of a word: neutral, bookish, colloquial, slang, etc. Stylistic connotation, or stylistic reference, another component of word meaning, stands somewhat apart from emotive and evaluative connotations. Indeed, it does not characterize a referent, but rather states how a word should be used by referring it to a certain functional style of the language peculiar to a specific sphere of communication. It shows in what social context, in what communicative situations the word can be used.Stylistically, words can be roughly classified into literary, or formal (e.g. commence, discharge, parent), neutral (e.g. father, begin, dismiss) and non-literary, or informal (e.g. dad, sack, set off).

It should be noted that connotation is not an obligatory component of word meaning. Many words, for instance, give, take, walk, book, table, etc., used in their direct meaning, denote but not connote anything. The meaning of a word is studied with the help of Componential Analysis. It consists in decomposition of the word meaning into semes minimal components of meaning, or elementary units of sense. One and the same seme may be found in the meaning of different related words. Thus, such words as boy and man have the common seme “the male sex””, and the words girl and woman “ the seme “the female sex”. Different semes may have different statuses in the system of semes in the word meaning. Lexicologists usually distinguish archisemes wich express the generic meaning and differential semes which modify or qualify the idea expressed by the archiseme. Thus, the word spinster may be split into the following semes: 1) human being (archiseme); 2) female, unmarried; elderly (differential semes). Componential analysis is one of the modern metods of semantic research which provides a deeper insight into semantic aspects of the language.

There are two approaches to the study of meaning: the referential approach and the functional approach. The former tries to define meaning in terms of relations between the word (sound form), concept (notion, thought) and referent (object which the word denotes). They are closely connected and the relationship between them is represented by "the semiotic triangle" ( = the basic triangle) of Ogden and Richards (in the book "The Meaning of Meaning" ) by O.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards).

The main criticism of this approach is the difficulty of identifying "concepts": they are mental phenomena and purely subjective, existing in the minds of individuals. The strongest point of this approach is that it connects meaning and the process of nomination.

The functional approach to meaning is less concerned with what meaning is than with how it works. It is argued, to say that "words have meanings" means only that they are used in a certain way in a sentence. There is no meaning beyond that. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), in particular, stressed the importance of this approach in his dictum: "The meaning of the word is its use in the language". So meaning is studied by making detailed analyses of the way words are used in contexts, through their relations to other words in speech, and not through their relations to concepts or referents.Actually, the functional approach is basically confined to the analysis of sameness or difference of meaning. For example, we can say that in "take the bottle" and "take to the bottle" take has different meaning as it is used differently, but it does not explain what the meaning of the verb is. So the functional approach should be used not as the theoretical basis for the study of meaning, but only as complementary to the referential approach.