Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 20, 2025
One of the chief sources, indeed, of lax habits of thought, is the custom of using connotative terms without a distinctly ascertained connotation, and with no more precise notion of their meaning than can be loosely collected from observing what objects they are used to denote. It is in this manner that we all acquire, and inevitably so, our first knowledge of our vernacular language.
Now, an utterance has the quality of style when these two appeals of language the denotative and the connotative, the definite and the indefinite, the intellectual and the sensuous are so coördinated as to produce upon the reader or the listener an effect which is, not dual, but indissolubly single.
It appears to me that they perceive in a way the sympathetic character of language and therefore take a peculiar pleasure in copying it. It is hardly to be believed that they ever get a sense of the connotative value of words, but it is not to be doubted that they sometimes attain to a certain appreciation of the denotation of simpler phrases.
So, again, only resemblance is predicated, when, though the predicate is a class name, the class is based on general unanalysable resemblance. The classes in question are those of the simple feelings; the names of feelings being, like all concrete general names, connotative, but only of a mere resemblance. In short, one of five things, viz.
When we say, The town is built of marble, we give the hearer what may be entirely new information, and this merely by the signification of the many-worded connotative name, “built of marble.” Such names are not signs of the mere objects, invented because we have occasion to think and speak of those objects individually; but signs which accompany an attribute; a kind of livery in which the attribute clothes all objects which are recognized as possessing it.
It is a connotative name. Connotative names have hence been also called denominative, because the subject which they denote is denominated by, or receives a name from the attribute which they connote.
Words not otherwise connotative may, in the mode just adverted to, acquire a special or technical connotation.
It has been seen that all concrete general names are connotative. Even abstract names, though the names only of attributes, may in some instances be justly considered as connotative; for attributes themselves may have attributes ascribed to them; and a word which denotes attributes may connote an attribute of those attributes.
All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal, the subject and predicate of the major premiss are connotative terms, denoting objects and connoting attributes.
It must not, however, be supposed that such names, when introduced, differ in any respect, as to their mode of signification, from other connotative names. The classes which they denote are, as much as any other classes, constituted by certain common attributes, and their names are significant of those attributes, and of nothing else.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking