ENGLISH CONNOTATIVE SETS AND SEMANTIC CHANGE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND AZERBAIJANI CONTEXTS

This article makes an attempt to analyze some linguistic demarcation lines between the denotative and connotative meanings of the phrases within the given context and tries to enlighten some causes of these connotative uses of phrases embodied in the content causing semantic change. It also tries to find out the reasons of usage of extra-linguistic factors pulling speakers to use connotative phrases. It was identified that among the speakers’ preferred choices the factors – “to be closer to context”, to seem more logical” and “to seem more convincing” occupy the leading positions when communicators instead of their denotative meanings tend to use the alternatively transferred meanings. Consequently, similar situations affect changing the semantic extensions of words belonging to a given lexical stock of each nationality. Apart from this, the author deems the age category of speakers also be influential reason among the choices to be peculiar to use connotations instead of the initial lexical meaning of the words. It is because our experimental analyses showed that the frequency of connotation usage is situationally age and memory driven which were confirmed in the responses of people between 25 and ≥81.