Zoltan Kövecses
Language, Mind and Culture
A Practical Introduction
Oxford University Press 2006

Kövecses 335
Meaning and culture

We can take culture to be a large set of meanings shared by a group of people. To be a member of a culture means to have the ability to make meaning with other people.

This requires for people to have the organ of meaning making, the brain, the cognitive processes of meaning making, the body that makes linguistic and nonlinguistic signs meaningful and that imbues with meaning all objects and events that are not signs themselves (e.g. a tree that we conceptualize as being vertical and tall), and the physical and social environment in which the brain and the body jointly involved. On this view, particular cultures consist of the particular meaning making processes that a group of people employs and the particular sets of meanings produced by them, in other words, a particular conceptual system.

The meaning making organs of the body and brain are shared universally and thus they do not belong to particular cultures. They are thus responsible for universal meanings – meaning shared by all people (though, universal meanings always have culture specific aspects to them;hence the notion of “relative universality”). However, as targets of conceptualization, both the body and the brain may be imbued with culture specific meanings in particular cultures.

A key component of meaning making is the physical and social environment. Cultures differ considerably relative to their physical and social environment. What this means in our terms is that the environment contributes a large portion of the meanings that members of the group use to understand other aspects of their world. This influence of the environment is most obvious in metaphorical conceptual isolation.

Also on this view, language can be regarded as a repository of meanings shared by members of a culture. This lends language a historical role in stabilizing and preserving a culture – due to linguistic relativity, the notion that language shapes thought. Language is thus a part of culture because it gives us clues for meaning. At the same time, however, language often underdetermines interpretation; we create particular meanings (construals) in context.

In the course of their interaction for particular purposes, members of the culture produce particular discourses. Such discourses can be thought of as particular symbolic meanings concerning particular subject matters. When discourses provide a particular perspective on especially significant subject matter is in a culture and when they function as latent norms of conduct, the discourses can be regarded as ideologies, which may have an impact on other discourses within the culture. Discourse in this sense is another source of meaning making. A large part of socialization involves the learning of how to make meaning in a culture.

Kövecses