Denotation and Connotation

Excerpts from Semiotics for Beginners

Denotation: The term refers to the relationship between the signifier and its signified. Denotation is routinely treated as the definitional, 'literal', 'obvious' or 'common sense' meaning of a sign, but semioticians tend to treat it as a signified about which there is a relatively broad consensus. For Barthes, a denotative sign existed within what he called the first order of signification. In this framework connotation is a further sign (or signs) deriving from the signifier of a denotative sign. However, no clear distinction can be made between denotation and connotation.

Connotation: The socio-cultural and personal associations produced as a reader decodes a text. Considered an “expressive value” attached to the sign.The term also refers to the relationship between the signifier and its signified. For Barthes, connotation was a second order of signification which uses the denotative sign (signifier and signified) as its signifier and attaches to it an additional signified. In this framework connotation is a which derives from the signifier of a denotative sign (so denotation leads to a chain of connotations).

• Both connotation and denotation involve the use of codes.
• Denotation has a broader consensus.   
• A sign can have many connotations, which will be somewhat different to everyone, but at the same time, they can not be entirely personal.  These connotations are determined by the codes to which the interpreter has access.
• Some connotations are widely accepted.  (ex: car can connote freedom or virility.)
• Changing the style or tone may change connotations.

Ex: choice of font

Soft focus – sharp focus

Choice of words that mean the same thing, but have different connotations

Example:

At the denotative level this is a photograph of the movie star Marilyn Monroe. At a connotative level we associate this photograph with Marilyn Monroe's star qualities of glamour, sexuality, beauty - if this is an early photograph - but also with her depression, drug-taking and untimely death if it is one of her last photographs. At a mythic level we understand this sign as activating the myth of Hollywood: the dream factory that produces glamour in the form of the stars it constructs, but also the dream machine that can crush them - all with a view to profit and expediency. (Hayward 1996, 310)