Semantics

There are two major types of meaning, the denotative meaning and the connotative meaning. Denotation refers to the literal meaning of a word, the "dictionary definition." For example, if you look up the word snake in the Merriam Webster’s New Collegiate 10th Edition dictionary, you will discover that one of its denotative meanings is "any of numerous scaly, legless, sometimes venomous reptiles having a long, tapering, cylindrical body and found in most tropical and temperate regions". Connotation, on the other hand, refers to the associations that are connected to a certain word or the emotional suggestions related to that word. The connotative meaning of a word exists in addition to the denotative meanings. For example, the connotations for the word snake could include evil or dangerous.

Semantics, lexical or structural, deals with direct (denotative) meaning, while pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that studies the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated (connotation). The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.

For example, suppose we want to ask someone next to us to stop smoking; we can achieve that goal by using several utterances. We can say, “Stop smoking, please!” which is direct. We can also say in an indirect way, “Sir, I have asthma.” In this way, the smoker will understand that his smoking is contributing to breathing difficulty.

Pragmatic competence is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects for language learners to grasp, and can only truly be learned through experience.

One of the most difficult aspects to acquire in a second language is communicating precisely the “intended meaning” in connotative inferences that are very particular to the sociolinguistics and culture of the target language. English has a strong tendency toward the use of idiomatic or set expressions and slang that are mainly based on connotation rather than direct denotative meaning. For example, to tell a person that you do not believe something unless he shows you, you can say, “I’m from Missouri.” If the listener does not know that Missouri’s nick name is “The Show Me State,” then he or she most likely will not infer the (indirect) meaning of the phrase “I have to see it to believe it.”