Connotation, Semantic Prosody, Syntagmatic Associative Meaning: Three Levels of Meaning?

Abstract

The paper discusses associative meaning, i.e. one existing over and above the customary denotation, specifically the type arising from a text segment larger than a single word. The idea is of fairly recent origin, focuses on negative and positive semantic effects, and stems from corpus-based findings. Dictionaries are uneven in their treatment of this aspect of meaning. It is suggested that research on this complex phenomenon of associative meaning might be conducted on any of three levels: single-word items (connotation), multiword items (semantic prosody), and broader if vaguer co(n)text (syntagmatic meaning).