Words similar to denotation
Example sentences for: denotation
How can you use “denotation” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:
Then, too, there have been the campaigners who have gone to what some regard as opposite extremes: if the head of a committee is known to be a man or a woman, then chairman or chairwoman must surely be the proper denotation; if the sex of the person is not known, then chairperson , though awkward-sounding, is the preferred form.
Then, at about the same time when colored was anathematized (despite the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has still not changed its name), black was legislated by that community of speakers to supplant Negro and colored, though I cannot recall any riders requiring a capital B . ( Cape Colored —or, more properly, Coloured —is retained in South Africa with a specific denotation of a “person of mixed European and African or Malayan ancestry” [ RHD Unabridged ], in which one must read White for “European” and dark-skinned for “African or Malayan.”
The terms used here are not immediately transparent: if by communicative intention is meant `denotative purpose, the information the speaker wishes to convey,' unless one views communication in the broadest way, it would seem to me that the definition confuses denotation with connotation; that is to say, whether an expression is euphemistic, neutral, or taboo is a matter of connotation, and the fact that a speaker avoids shit for defecate, move one's bowels , etc., is purely a connotative matter: denotatively (communicatively?)
Vulgar still carries the strong denotation exemplified in the first (hence the most frequently encountered) sense, “characterized by ignorance of or lack of good breeding or taste: vulgar ostentation .” It has congeners, like vulgarian “a vulgar person”; vulgarism “ 1. the state or quality of being vulgar.
I can conclude only that that communicative intention is used to mean both denotation and connotation: but if that is so, then it would seem that the contrast implicit in euphemism is lost.
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