| The signifying nature of language predetermines the cultural essence of language. Words, the fundamental basis of a language and the basic vehicle of culture, play an important role in the study of language and culture. This paper studies the semantic structure of culture-loaded words from the perspective of cognition.The introduction of this paper, after defining four key words—culture, cultural meaning, culture-loaded words, and semantic structure, has a discussion about the previous studies of culture-loaded words. Most previous studies, employing language-to-culture approach or culture-to-language approach, are mainly descriptive and objectivistic. As a result, man's power of cognition in inventing language tool and creatively making use of this tool is ignored.For the sake of the application of cognitive theories to the semantic analysis of culture-loaded words, the central hypotheses of cognitive linguistics are summarized in the first chapter with special attention on the introduction of the postulations of cognitive semantics.The second chapter explores the three cognitive approaches—synaesthesia, metonymy, and metaphor, and their cognitive functioning in the formation of the semantic structures of culture-loaded words.In the third chapter, culture-loaded words are examined in terms of the objective restrictions on human cognition from environment and human-centrism. Studies show that cultural meanings of certain words are environment specific and reflect human-centrism.Chapter Four is a research on culture-loaded words in English and Chinese by application of prominence theory and attentional view to the analysis of their semantic structures. The author concludes that culture-loaded words in different languages have different prominence structures and attentional systems.Category theories are employed in the last chapter to delve into the differences in semantic structures of polysemy, domain extensions, and category partitioning— category abstraction and specificity.
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