Sentence examples for denotative from inspiring English sources

Linguists like to make a distinction between the denotative function of a sign – what it literally means – and the connotative, which is (roughly) what it tells you by implication.

The denotative meanings of these abbreviations vary over a wide range.

The movement between associative or impressionistic writing and the denotative is one of the poem's many pleasures.

Music remains atmospheric; never, except in Wagner's system, denotative.

Indeed, not much of anything denotative is easy to discern.

"Poetry can be denotative and connotative at the same time," she said.

But her strange vernacular feels like words might if they could only burst from their denotative shells.

While Goodman may have identified a denotative role for buildings, this is not clearly a semantic role.

Since 'Cicero' and 'Tully' are both proper names and therefore purely denotative, it would seem to follow on Mill's account that, contrary to fact, the two propositions have the same import.

Furthermore, judgment must be aesthetic insofar as it does not produce denotative knowledge about a determinable state of affairs, but refers to the way our faculties interact with each other as we move from one mode of phrasing to another, i.e. the denotative, the prescriptive, the performative, the political, the cognitive, the artistic, etc.

Nevertheless, capital also demands the continual re-invention of the "new" in the form of new language games and new denotative statements, and so, paradoxically, a certain paralogy is required by the system itself.