The lexical semantics of 'culture'

Abstract

'Culture' is one of the key words of the English language, in popular as well as scholarly discourse. It is flourishing in popular usage, with proliferation of extended uses (police culture, Barbie culture, argument culture, culture of complaint, etc.), while being endlessly debated in intellectual circles. Though it is sometimes observed that the meaning of the English word culture is highly language-specific, its precise lexical semantics has received surprisingly little attention. The main task undertaken in this paper is to develop and justify semantic explications for the common ordinary meanings of this polysemous word. My analytical framework is the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach originated by Anna Wierzbicka. I will propose a set of semantic explications framed in terms of empirically established universal primes such as PEOPLE, THINK, DO, LIVE, NOT, LIKE, THE SAME, and OTHER.