 The emotive and descriptive meanings of signs are related in a variety of ways. Signs may have both emotive and descriptive meaning, and often do. Perhaps a noncontroversial example is the sentence ‘That was courageous’, whose descriptive meaning relates tokens of the sentence to cognitive states that, in some way, represent the action referred to as one performed in spite of an actor’s fear, and whose emotive meaning relates tokens of the sentence to favorable states, such as admiration towards the action or actor. According to Stevenson, almost all words in a natural language have both emotive and descriptive meaning owing to their historical uses in emotional contexts (1944, 71). The interplay of emotive and descriptive meaning is complex. For example, the word ‘democracy’ may have come to possess its laudatory emotive meaning in certain contexts because the word refers, via its descriptive meaning, to properties of government that are favored in these contexts. Under suitable circumstances, the word might retain its descriptive meaning and acquire a less laudatory emotive meaning, or change its descriptive meaning due to its emotive meaning remaining constant (1944, 72).