A Cognitive Study On Lexical Cultural Meaning

Lexical cultural meaning, as a universal phenomenon of natural language, has been widely discussed in linguistic literature. Previous studies on lexical cultural meaning are basically synchronic and diachronic descriptions constrained by the structuralist semantic framework. This research intends to study the cognitive mechanism and meaning construction model of cultural words from the perspectives of cognitive semantics and cognitive anthropology.The subjects of this study are words and phrases with cultural meaning. Because cultural meaning is the interactive outcome of the objective world and subjective consciousness, as well as the thinking patterns and cultural mentality of language users with different cultural backgrounds, we therefore propose a cultural-cognitive semantic framework which unifies the theories of cultural models and cognitive semantics for analyzing cultural meaning.Research in cognitive anthropology shows that every nation has its unique cultural models, which determines the patterns of thinking and language expressions. In return, the use of language also reflects the cultural features of this nation. Cultural models have significant influence on the classificational fineness in semantic field, motivation of semantic extension, as well as collocational power, richness of meaning, and emotional coloring of words. Cognitive semantics argues that meaning is constructed in the process when human being is perceiving and understanding the world. Its three cognitive principles—metaphor, metonymy and image schema are of great significance to analyzing the cognitive mechanism of lexical cultural meaning.Under this cultural-cognitive semantic framework, a cultural semantic relation model is introduced, which is based on cultural models, cognitive models, as well as prototype and conceptual categorization. Through a wealth of data analysis, it is argued that lexical cultural meaning is acquired on the basis of conceptual meaning, acted upon by the cultural models, with implicit metaphorical and metonymic mappings interwoven in its semantic extension. In this process, physical- and mental-resemblance-based metaphorical mapping and contiguity- and salience-based metonymic mapping play an important role.It is found that the metaphorical features of cultural meaning are present at different levels of language, including phonological level, lexical level, syntactic level and supra-syntactic level; metaphorical sources of lexical cultural meaning covers almost every domain of social culture and human life, such as human body, plant, animal, food, space, event, color, clothing, number, as well as literature works etc.; the cognitive structure of cultural meaning appears in three forms: concatenation, radiation and cross-link.Based on the sense relation model of cultural words, a detailed contrastive analysis of the semantic structure of shou and hand, chi and eat are produced. The similarities and difference in the metaphorical features of these two pairs of equivalents in Chinese and English have been analyzed and explained from cultural perspectives.A cognitive research into cultural meaning of words has great significance in foreign language pedagogy, bi-lingual dictionary compilation, translation and cross-cultural communication.