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HISTORY PAGE INDEX
Control Over Connotative Meaning is Essential
Language authorities have long agreed that
control over connotative meaning spells the difference between powerful,
memorable writing, and flat, weak writing:
- "No one can write with color, force, and
persuasiveness without control over connotation." (Weaver, R.M. A Rhetoric and
Composition Handbook. New York, NY: William Morrow & Co., 1974.)
- "Skill in using the emotional appeal of
connotation is essential in any writing designed to persuade, convince, anger, inspire, or
soothe a reader." (McCrimmon,
J.M. Writing with a Purpose. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950.)
- "In most contexts, denotation is less
important than attitude, implied emotional stance, or tone." (Jerome, J. The Poet and the
Poem. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1979.)
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Codifying Connotative Meaning: The Technical Problem
For hundreds of years, lexicographers have
systematically codified the denotative meanings of words. Collections of definitions
evolved into dictionaries, thesauruses and related denotative language reference tools.
However, connotative meaning has eluded such codification or "pinning down":
Denotation and connotation. . .
represent two vocabularies using the same set of words. The denotative usage presents the
thing in its essential and objective meaning. The connotative usage presents it enriched
by associations and feelings which, though not susceptible of being pinned down, are
nonetheless real. (Weaver, R.
M. A Rhetoric and Composition Handbook. New York, NY: William Morrow & Company,
1974)
For example, a dictionary provides the
following denotative meaning for the word pub:
"a building providing
alcoholic drinks for consumption on the premises." (Oxford Dictionary)
However, the word pub
simultaneously evokes a host of emotional connotations, such as merriment, pleasure,
cheerfulness, perhaps some sadness, and so on. Similarly, words such as summer, love, and
melody carry a variety of positive emotional connotative associations for most
people, while words such as cancer, rape, and homeless
have negative emotional connotations. In all cases, the associated connotations are not
systematically accessible using any known language reference resource or tool.
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The reason for the absence of codification
of connotative meaning is that, while words readily evoke emotional connotations, the
converse is not true: emotional connotations are not easily codified using words.
Unlike denotative meaning, connotative or
affective meaning does not naturally lend itself to systematic word-symbol codification.
Emotions are felt, not thought. Lexicographers cannot employ their usual methods to codify
the relationship between a word and its associated connotative content.
People have known for thousands of years
that words convey connotative meaning. The problem of "pinning down" the
emotional or connotative meanings of words is technical in nature, not conceptual.
The development of emotional or
connotative language tools had to await two main technical developments that did not come
along until the 20th Century:
1. The development
of accurate psychological
measurement techniques, the science of which
began to mature only a few decades ago, led
by psychologists such as Likert, Thurstone,
Osgood, and others.
2. The development
of computers, especially the kind
of high capacity, very fast personal computers that
have only become available in the 1990s.
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Towards a Solution: Attitude Measurement
People adopt attitudes, hold opinions and
express emotions with varying levels of intensity. To investigate "attitude" and
measure its intensity, investigators typically use rating scales. Statistical techniques
founded upon mathematical proofs such as the Central Limit Theorem are used to analyze
numerically-scaled data classified into various "levels of measurement." (Four
levels of measurement corresponding to increasing levels of precision are typically
identified in the literature: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.) Statistics used in
data analysis may include factor analysis, sample variance, standard error of the mean,
and multinomial probability distribution.
In the 1920s and 1930s, psychologists L.
L. Thurstone and Rensis Likert pioneered attitude-measurement scaling methodologies.
Thurstone’s contribution was a type of "differentiated" scale, a scale that
would determine a person’s attitude (towards an object or concept) along a continuum
with acceptable accuracy.
Likert, a psychologist investigating
corporate management styles, devised a "summated" scale, a type of attitude
scale that allowed for the summation and averaging of scaled responses. An example of a
Likert scale is this familiar sequence:
strongly agree
somewhat agree
neither agree nor disagree
somewhat disagree
strongly disagree
There are many variations on this theme,
but in general, Likert’s method involved attaching numbers to levels of meaning. The
Likert-type scale proved to be very robust, and continues to be widely used today.
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Linking Words with Attitude: Osgood's
"Semantic Space"
The scale types devised by Thurstone,
Likert and others did not explicitly connect scaled measurement with the connotative
meanings of words. Charles Osgood, an American psychologist, is credited with this
breakthrough. In the early 1950s, Osgood and colleagues used Roget's Thesaurus to
help construct bipolar scales based on semantic opposites, such as "good-bad",
"soft-hard", "fast-slow," "clean-dirty,"
"valuable-worthless," "fair-unfair," and so on. Osgood called these
scales "semantic differential" scales because they differentiated attitudinal
intensity based on a person’s subjective understanding of the connotative meanings of
words.
Osgood et al were able to use computer
technology (newly available at the time) and factor analysis to explore large amounts of
data provided by numerous "judges" (i.e., ordinary people recruited to express
their attitudes), who evaluated numerous words and phrases on numerous semantic
differential scales. The outcome was Osgood’s discovery of "semantic
space"—the existence of three measurable underlying attitudinal dimensions that
everyone uses to evaluate everything in their social environment, regardless of language
or culture. These three dimensions are Evaluation, Power, and Activity, known as EPA.
Subsequent experimentation by many investigators around the world confirmed the reality of
semantic space and its cross-cultural validity (Japan, Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland etc.)
Osgood’s team had, in effect,
discovered a methodology for quantifying connotative semantic meaning. In 1957, Osgood and
colleagues published their findings in a landmark volume, The Measurement of Meaning. (Osgood,
Suci, and Tannenbaum, 1957)
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A vast psychological literature on
semantic differential and semantic space has developed over more than 40 years. Along with
Likert scaling, Osgood’s semantic differential has been in continuous use since the
method was first published, and is considered a mainstay of measurement of connotative
meaning in psychology and other social sciences.
The Evaluation, Potency, and
Activity (EPA) structure in subjective responses is one of the best documented facts in
social science, and an elaborate technology has developed for measuring EPA responses on
"semantic differential scales." (Heise, D. R. "Affect Control Theory and Impression
Formation" in Borgatta, E. and Borgatta, M. (Eds.). Encyclopedia of Sociology, Vol.
1. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1992)
Here is a brief overview of semantic
differential technique:
The semantic differential..is
a method for measuring the meaning of an object to an individual. It may also be thought
of as a series of attitude scales. The subject is asked to rate a given concept (for
example, Irish, Republican, wife, me as I am) on a series of seven-point bipolar
rating scales. Any concept—whether it is a political issue, a person, an institution,
a work of art—can be rated . . . Subgroups of the scales can be summed up to yield
scores that are interpreted as indicating the individual’s position on three
underlying dimensions of attitude toward the object being rated. These dimensions have
been identified by using factor-analytic procedures (factor analysis is a [statistical]
method of finding the common element or elements that underlie a set of measures) in
examining the responses of many individuals concerning many concepts or objects. It has
been found that . . . three subgroups measure the following three dimensions of attitude:
(1) the individual’s evaluation of the object or concept being rated,
corresponding to the favorable-unfavorable dimension in more traditional attitude scales;
(2) the individual’s perception of the potency or power of the object or
concept; and (3) the individual’s perception of the activity of the object or
concept. (Kidder, L. M. Research
Methods in Social Relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981)
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Of the three dimensions of semantic space,
Evaluation proved to be the most important. Evaluation is also known as the
"connotative" or "affective" dimension.
Of these dimensions, the one most
heavily weighted in people’s judgments is evaluation. Osgood has recommended using it
as the prime indicator of attitude toward the object. Clearly it is an affective
dimension. (Oskamp, S. Attitudes
and Opinions. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977)
"Affective" or
"affect" is the term psychologists use when referring to emotion, or more
specifically, the emotion associated with an idea or set of ideas.
The problem with the semantic differential
technique is that it does not distinguish beyond a single evaluative continuum, with
positive attitude at one end of the scale through to negative attitude at the other end.
That is, it does not actually identify any individual emotions.
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Evolution of Connotative Reference™
Technology
In the late 1970s, Wayne Chase, a graduate
in English and psychology with training and job experience in statistics, research design,
and computing, became intrigued with Osgood’s findings and various applications of
the semantic differential. Reviewing the literature, he found that several psychologists
had compiled short "semantic differential dictionaries" of 500 to 1,500 words
with EPA scores for each word (known in the literature as semantic "atlases"
because they are analogous to "maps" of semantic space). Chase reasoned that,
since these semantic atlases are actually miniature connotative dictionaries, it
should be possible to develop a similar connotative dictionary for the entire English
language. This would be the connotative equivalent of the familiar "denotative
dictionary," the ordinary dictionary that all of us are familiar with. A connotative
dictionary would be of tremendous interest to creative writers, students and others who
regularly consult dictionaries and thesauruses.
In the early 1980s, Chase began to
organize a primitive connotative database on paper. However, without access to a computer,
the work was extremely slow and tedious. Mainframe computers were only available to those
affiliated with corporations, government, or academic institutions. Early personal
computers were prohibitively expensive, and software for them was crude and complicated.
In 1987, Chase acquired an IBM PC clone
and began to computerize the fledgling database using the DOS application dBASE.
His plan was to eventually export the connotative database to a desktop publishing program
and create a connotative dictionary in book form. This would be the first full-language
connotative reference work in any language.
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As the database grew, Chase began to get a
better handle on the scope of the work required to complete the connotative dictionary.
Software would have certain advantages over print, although both would be feasible.
Software could scan and analyze the connotative content of an entire piece of written
work. At first, Chase called this application the "Emotional Impact Analyst." By
the late 1990s, it became the "Emotional Meaning and Impact" analyst, or
"EMMI." This "EMMI" application would be the connotative equivalent of
the denotative "grammar checker" (which analyzes the grammatical content of an
entire written piece). Analyzing emotional content would, for the first time, provide
writers with a method of predicting the subjective or emotional impact of a piece of
writing on an audience. A writer would be able to tailor the emotional message inherent in
his or her writing before presenting it to an audience. The audience could be
anyone, from readers of novels to viewers of television drama to consumers of advertising
messages.
Chase continued working on the connotative
database through the 1990s, even though mainstream personal computers of the day (up to
about 1996) would have been unable to handle fully-developed EMMI software, had it existed
at the time. Hard drives were too small and processors too slow. Observing the rapid
development of computer hardware, Chase was confident that it would not be long before
personal computers affordable to everyone would have sufficient disk capacity and speed to
handle EMMI.
In April, 1998, Chase sought help at the
University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. Academic staff and students in
English, psychology, and linguistics joined the EMMI project and made it possible to prove
the concept on a substantial scale through a multi-phase pilot study.
Five comprehensive patent applications
were filed in Seattle, USA, in August, 1999.
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