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component of the lexical meaning which makes communication
possible. There is no doubt that a physicist knows more about the
atom than a singer does, or that an arctic explorer possesses a
much deeper knowledge of what arctic ice is like than a man who
has never been in the North. Nevertheless they use the words atom,
Arctic, etc. and understand each other.
The second component of the lexical meaning is the
connotational component, i.e. the emotive charge and the stylistic
value of the word.
Words contain an element of emotive evaluation as part of
the connotational meaning; e.g. a hovel denotes ‘a small house or
cottage’ and besides implies that it is a miserable dwelling place,
dirty, in bad repair and in general unpleasant to live in The
emotive charge is one of the objective semantic features proper to
words as linguistic units and forms part of the connotational
component of meaning.
Words differ not only in their emotive charge but also in
their stylistic reference. Stylistically words can be roughly
subdivided into literary, neutral and colloquial layers.1
The greater part of the literаrу layer of Modern English
vocabulary are words of general use, possessing no specific
stylistic reference and known as neutral words. Against the
background of neutral words we can distinguish two major
subgroups — standard colloquial words and literary or bookish
words. This may be best illustrated by comparing words almost
identical in their denotational meaning, e. g., ‘parent — father —
dad’. In comparison with the word father which is stylistically
neutral, dad stands out as colloquial and parent is felt as bookish.
The stylistic reference of standard colloquial words is clearly
observed when we compare them with their neutral synonyms, e.g.
chum — friend, rot — nonsense, etc. This is also true of literary or
bookish words, such as, e.g., to presume (cf. to suppose), to
anticipate (cf. to expect) and others.

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