Words' connotations and semantic construals

Abstract

Within a semantic approach to different aspects of language experience language phenomena need to be revealed in their significance. In particular, what should be clarified is
the common sign-structures of things and words at three different levels: of theoretical form, of actual existence and of socio-cultural values. This will help overcome the main referential illusion of dealing with “existent objects” irrelevant to their significance, or the sign-valued understanding. Respectively, the illusionary semantic study of word-meanings irrespective of
their anthropological, social and psychological value-connotations would be avoided. The claim in this paper is that in human experience we have access to actual objects via sensations of physical, material character but we perceive or apprehend these objects as signs.
Without being a sign, an object is not recognizable, nor communicable or understandable. This means that to become a sign, every single object has to identify some other object or any object like it, or be understood as presented in its specific features in an actual act of communication of any form. Such objects are predicative signs of speech or thought. A thing obtains its reality as an object on the level of cultural values or social functions as a sign-type
with its own name, meaning and connotations. These connotations as values of meanings (or of values) govern the dynamics of object and word-transformations. As a result of a connotative analysis of word semantics, it may be possible to clarify the general types of word meaning:
iconic-metaphorical, object-symbolical and symbolic-allegorical. Finally, it is necessary to extract the main semantic features (or marks), understood as named substantiated qualities like soundness, lightness (darkness), substantiality, formality, corporeality, humanity, etc. in their construal function as words’ iconic etymons. On these grounds – on the grounds of
sign-words’ meanings – it is possible to build lexico-semantic architectonic categorization and systematization of words’ meanings in order to establish a lexico-grammatical system of language and to understand lexico-semantic development of values, transformations of
meanings and word-formation processes.