National Cultural Implications Of Cognitive Interpretation

"As a manifestation of the national cultural semantic feature in the language, National Cultural Connotation (NNC) reflects the history, customs, and habits of the nation and is heavily tinted with that nation's culture. It is an additional cultural connotation attached to a linguistic unit on the basis of its conceptual meaning. Therefore, without the national and cultural background, it is almost impossible to understand the implication of the language unit."This study of NCC covers four aspects: object, culture, cognition, and semantics. Since cognition is a crucial, underlying factor in the formation and extension of meaning, an in-depth research on NCC conducted in the light of cognitive approach will definitely enlarge the scope of the study. The theoretical and practical basis of this project lies in the strong interpreting capability intrinsic in cognitive linguistics for NCC. This can find proof in the facts that meaning exists in the conceptual system built on the foundation of the cognitive model; that it is the reflection from language symbols to cognitive entities; and that it is also the result of the inextricably intertwined interplay of such facets as psychology, culture, society, and ecology. The extension or transfer of primary meaning is realized by means of metaphor and metonymy. The dissertation is composed of four sections: the nature of NCC, the basic framework of its formation, the construction of NCC, and its interpretation.By nature, NCC is intrinsically a national cultural addition to language units, which finds its expression in such characteristics as uniqueness, differentiation, similarity and blending, in both national and cultural sense. In the perspective of the relationship of language units and their cultural connotation, NCC is a national cultural branch stemmed from the conceptual meaning of a language unit. In other words, semantic extensions or transferred meanings of concepts are bound with national cultural encodings or associations, because this linguistic phenomenon is exclusively cultivated in the climate of national psychology, customs, and social historical cultures. Under the guidance of cognitive theory and through the inductive...