Cultural Encodings In Word Meaning

The relationship between language and culture has long been taken into consideration. The complex interaction between the two starts from human beings' first ambition to create language in an attempt to bridge the outside reality with their inner psychological world, for people can not live in a world which is neither perceivable nor understandable. The creation and application of linguistic symbols, in its broad sense, a meaning-making practice is, in essence, a cultural practice because it always involves human understanding. It is at this point that language interweaves with culture.Different life experiences of peoples lead to different understanding and evaluations of the objective reality confronting them. Those ideas exhibit themselves in forms of customs, traditions, religious beliefs, and works of art, which help to shape particular cultural modes or cultural orientations. What is more important is that such cultural messages are most likely to be codified in, transmitted through, and reinforced by language. Thus, language is not merely a system of purely linguistic signs but a symbolic representation of the cultural world. When boiled down to an individual word, it is safe to say that the meaning of a word goes far beyond what it refers to in some objective known, pre-given world, but also includes the world of cultural and social understanding it brings into being when used.Based on some pioneer researches by modem linguists andanthropologists who integrated linguistic study into the framework of culture, this thesis makes an effort to elaborate the relationship between language and culture by decoding cultural connotations embedded in word meaning. This theme is elucidated from a contrastive approach and supported by a word association test out of the following concern. First, a culture stands out only in contrast with other cultures. Contrastive analysis enables people to be more aware of cultural differences so as to improve the appreciation of one's own culture as well as to have more tolerance for foreign ones. Second, language is, in a certain sense, just like the air people breathe. Very often people take it for granted and are hardly conscious of its cultural implications or values which constitute a potential shaping force for the minds. The study of word association makes it possible to reveal the cultural knowledge and assumptions that have been accommodated into people's cognitive schemata; therefore, it proves that words which equal in two languages denotatively but differ connotatively are the result of different schemata developed in different cultures and encoded in different languages.This paper aims to breed a cultural awareness or cultural sensitivity in people's language use so as to better our communication.