Some linguists believe that early language was always about specific entities–that is, denotational; this kind of reference then evolves into concepts, which are connotational. For example, a baby learns his or her particular meaning of MAMA, which then generalizes into MOTHERHOOD.
We can still see such evolution at work today. About two years ago, the term “Sarah Palin” was only denotational, but after the fall of 2008, it has now become quite connotational. Something similar might be said on the other side of the political spectrum about the term “Barack Obama.”
The whole process of turning denotation into connotation has been extensively studied and is better known as “branding.” Anyone who has ever written a resumé has had experience in doing it.
A semantic dictionary in fact trades on the natural kind of branding. Since we do statistical analyses of context to assign meaning, We may not yet be able to interpret a term for which we have only a small sample of occurrences. Give us a little time, though.