Connotation Finally, words have affective meanings or connotations. The word connotations has different meanings in different fields, but here we use it to mean the aspects of a word's meaning that are related to a writer or reader's emotions, sentiment, opinions, or evaluations. For example some words have positive connotations (happy) while others have negative connotations (sad). Even words whose meanings are similar in other ways can vary in connotation; consider the difference in connotations between fake, knockoff, forgery, on the one hand, and copy, replica, reproduction on the other, or innocent (positive connotation) and naive (negative connotation). Some words describe positive evaluation (great, love) and others negative evaluation (terrible, hate). Positive or negative evaluation language is called sentiment, as we saw in Chapter 4, and word sentiment plays a role in important sentiment tasks like sentiment analysis, stance detection, and applications of NLP to the language of politics and consumer reviews.