Types of connotative meaning, and their significance for translation

Abstract

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 ‘parsetree’ 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.