An extract on "Connotative Meanings" from a paper

I was reading a paper passed to me by Robin Sensei. The title is "The Pragmatics of Connotation", Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007), pp. 1047-1057. Written by Keith Allan. Here I would like to provide an extract of some important points that is very related to my research and might be useful for you too.


"...connotative meanings are related to Speaker’s real-world experience, they will vary from
community to community to a greater extent than denotative meanings. Insulting comparisons of people with animals rely on certain conventionally ascribed behaviours, i.e. on encyclopaedic knowledge, experiences, beliefs, and prejudices about the animal. These pragmatic effects attach to the animal name and endow it with the potential for figurative application to humans that are thereby ascribed similar behaviours. There are semantic constraints such as that names of female animals can normally be used only in naming or addressing women and male homosexuals: e.g. a cat is typically a "vicious and/or scratchy woman"; but a pussy is used (mostly in America) to insult a male for being "effeminate, homosexual" and occasionally of a female for having a "weak character" (it is also slang for a femme "lesbian who adopts the feminine role"); a bitch is a "(usually nasty) woman held in contempt"; a vixen is a "cunning, perhaps sneaky, woman"; cow and sow don’t differ much, they generally denote a "woman disliked, who is typically doltish" – and there are connotations of being fat, too, cf. the commonly used fat cow/sow. Some animal names are typically used of men: mongrel, cur or swine denotes a "vicious, nasty fellow, held in contempt" (comparable with cat and bitch of women); a fox denotes a "cunning man", compare vixen ( foxy lady is a compliment to the sexiness of a woman); a bull is for a "big, often rather clumsy, man"; stallion, goat or ram can be used of a "horny/randy man". Figurative extensions like animal names applied to humans seem to rely on the pragmatic effects of their connotation to a greater extent than on sense or denotation. Note that although connotation is distinct from denotation, it is to some extent dependent on denotata as the objects of knowledge or belief."

I believe that the modification of standard Malay word into a new spelling variety, I called it Evolutionized Malay, has many reasons. Not only to achieve simplification or economization, as normally argued by almost everybody, another would be for the "spoken-style" mode. And another important factor is about expressing feelings or suggesting "some" ideas by means of spelling alterations. My point is 'Expression', which has strong relationship with the connotation of words that are purposely written in a non-standard spelling within computer-mediated communication (CMC).