Many words are used to refer to our experience of the world. They have a denotation. House denotes a kind of object—the sort of thing people live in, with a roof and a door, etc. Cheap denotes a quality, that is, a relation between certain things; in particular, the quality of being easily obtained especially in exchange for money. Eat denotes a dynamic relation between things, a kind of event in which something happens to something. Many everyday words lend themselves fairly easily to the classification of denotations that has been suggested here: objects, qualities and events. Cup, big and run would fit in very well. There is, however, some difficulty in using these notional criteria to classify words. For example, it seems difficult to answer the question whether cheapness denotes something different from cheap; it could be that the words simply reflect different ways of looking at the same ‘piece of reality’. Nor is it clear that all words that appear to be used for talking about the world of our experience have denotations. There might be disputes about the reality of anything denoted by nice or democracy. It might be held that these words merely signal the approving attitude of the person who uses them. Since words are formal elements in verbal patterns, and since denotation is such a difficult concept to handle, there is a danger of circularity and lack of precision if we use meanings to identify classes of words. Nevertheless, once the formal classes have been identified by distribution and inflection, it is possible to take note of certain broad correlations of formal classes with types
of meaning.