A Contrastive Study of the Connotative Meaning of Linguistic Signs in English and Chinese

According to G. Leech’s classification of meaning, the denotative meaning of a word is different from its connotative one. The denotation of a linguistic sign may be the same in different languages, but their connotations may be quite different. The paper makes a contrastive analysis of the connotative meaning of linguistic signs in English and Chinese, such as Color terms, Kinship terms, Animal-related Words and Euphemisms. It also discusses the reason for the differences between the two languages.