Connotation (semiotics)

Abstract: Understanding the connotation of words plays an important role in interpreting subtle shades of sentiment beyond denotative or surface meaning of text, as seemingly objective statements often allude nuanced sentiment of the writer, and even purposefully conjure emotion from the readers’ minds. The focus of this paper is drawing nuanced, connotative sentiments from even those words that are objective on the surface, such as “intelligence”, “human”, and “cheesecake”. We propose induction algorithms encoding a diverse set of linguistic insights (semantic prosody, distributional similarity, semantic parallelism of coordination) and prior knowledge drawn from lexical resources, resulting in the first broad-coverage connotation lexicon.

Abstract: Through a particular choice of a predicate (e.g., "x violated y"), a writer can subtly connote a range of implied sentiments and presupposed facts about the entities x and y: (1) writer's perspective: projecting x as an "antagonist"and y as a "victim", (2) entities' perspective: y probably dislikes x, (3) effect: something bad happened to y, (4) value: y is something valuable, and (5) mental state: y is distressed by the event. We introduce connotation frames as a representation formalism to organize these rich dimensions of connotation using typed relations. First, we investigate the feasibility of obtaining connotative labels through crowdsourcing experiments. We then present models for predicting the connotation frames of verb predicates based on their distributional word representations and the interplay between different types of connotative relations. Empirical results confirm that connotation frames can be induced from various data sources that reflect how people use language and give rise to the connotative meanings. We conclude with analytical results that show the potential use of connotation frames for analyzing subtle biases in online news media.

Abstract: This is a theoretically oriented study of the pragmatics of Vietnamese person reference (kinship terms, personal pronouns, naming set and status terms). Drawing upon linguistic data from a radically different non-Western society and the seminal insights of Volosinov, Bakhtin, and Leach, it offers a critical analysis of the major theoretical premises of dominant approaches to denotation and connotation, to knowledge of language and to knowledge of the world. The study suggests that the pragmatic presuppositions of Vietnamese person-referring forms figure in the native definitions of linguistic meanings as prominently as any denotative features. It is argued that the significance of pragmatic implications should be analyzed in relation to the native speaker's conception of the world.

Abstract: Many linguistic expressions are constructed around colour words: ‘see red’, ‘green with envy’, ‘whiter than white’ They appear to confirm the existence of connotative meanings, and are often cited in commentaries regarding connotative meaning But to what extent does the functional linguistic use of these expressions correspond to their etymology? This study examines such colour-word expressions using authentic, naturally-occurring data drawn from general reference corpora in English and Italian The corpus evidence turns theoretical linguistic description on its head Those expressions that are said to prove the existence of connotative meanings do nothing of the sort In communicative acts, they are chosen for their pragmatic value, not their compositional semantic content, and display the unmistakable signs of delexicalisation However, connotative meaning does find its way into language in use: it abounds in the many and various innovative expressions based upon those delexicalised canonical forms It is in translation that the full implications of delexicalisation and relexicalisation come to the fore The realisation that conventional language is essentially delexicalised encourages the translator to work mainly with pragmatic, functional meaning This prioritises the translation of meaning over word-form, resulting in a more faithful transmission of semantic content from one language to another