="justify"> · Connotative
Denotative meaning is the conceptual nuclear of the word meaning. Denotative meaning is bound up with its referent. Referent is an object or phenomenon in our world which the given word names. Denotative meaning may have one constant referent. (Moon), but also it can have several referents (ex. a hand - firstly its referen tis a part of human arm; its second referent is the pointer on a clock; its third referent is a person (workman)).
Denotative meaning may have diffusive character, as in the case with the words: good, bad, clever, progressive. The denotative meaning is sometimes called: logical meaning; referential meaning, cognitive meaning; conceptual meaning or simply speaking, the literal meaning of a word.
If the denotative meaning is the nuclear part of the lexical meaning of a word, then the connotative meaning is its shell. Simply speaking, the connotative meaning is what we call additional, non-literal meaning of a word. It contains various shades. For example, the denotative component of the lexical meaning of the word awful, is «very bad».
According to the subject-matter of the Course Paper, let us examine a question the Concept of Polarity of Meaning.
1.1 The Concept of Polarity of Meaning
investigation problems of the concept of polarity of meaning is not the main task, therefore this problem has been described briefly. The term polarity exists in such fields of human knowledge as physics, mathematics, chemistry, psychology and etc. In linguistic this term can be found in semantic classification of the words.
The problem of the polarity of semantic meaning may be viewed in the Course Paper as a theoretical base to describe some classifications in various ways. The matter is that semantic classifications are generally based on the semantic similarity (or polarity) of words (or their component - morphemes).
Semantic similarity or polarity of words may be observed in the similarity of their denotational or connotational meaning. Similarity or polarity of the denotational component of lexical meaning is to be found in lexical groups of synonyms and antonyms. Similarity or polarity of the connotational components serves as the basis for stylistic stratification of vocabulary units.
Antonymic pairs are usually listed in a special dictionary called thesaurus. Yet there are other criteria according to which it is possible to reveal antonyms. The most important of them are: contextual criterion, the possibility of substitution, and identical lexical valency.
According to the contextual criterion two words are considered antonyms if they are regularly contrasted in actual speech. The use of antonyms in the same contexts has produced fixed antonymic constructions, such as: a higher degree of abstraction or more generalized character.
Unlike synonyms antonyms do not differ in style, or emotional coloring (they express, as a rule, emotional characteristics of the same intensity.
So, we can base on the definition antonyms as two or more words belonging to the same pat of speech, contradictory or contrary in meaning, and interchangeable at least at some contexts.
