Denotative meaning of a word is ___________.

Concept: Every word carries a denotative meaning — its literal, dictionary/primary sense, the basic factual definition that speakers of a language agree on, independent of any feeling, culture, or context attached to it. This is different from connotation (the extra emotional or associative layer built on top of the literal sense) and from grammatical meaning (the meaning a word carries through its grammatical role, such as tense or number).

Application: The blank in the stem asks what denotative meaning "is". Applying the definition above, denotation is exactly the word's literal, factual, dictionary sense — which matches the option describing it as "factual meaning or basic meaning".

Cross-check — why the other options describe different concepts, not denotation:

• "much more than what a word actually means" describes connotation — the associative/emotional layer added on top of the literal sense, not the literal sense itself.

• "figurative meaning" describes a non-literal, metaphorical use of a word, which again sits under connotative/rhetorical usage, not the literal dictionary sense.

• "grammatical meaning" describes the meaning conveyed by a word's grammatical form or role (tense, number, case), a separate linguistic category from lexical meaning altogether.

Since only the factual/basic-meaning description matches the literal, dictionary definition that denotation refers to, that is the correct completion of the sentence.