1 s2.0 S0388000104000725 Main

Language Sciences 27 (2005) 5173
www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci
The lexical semantics of culture

Cli Goddard
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, University of New England,

Armidale, New South Wales 2351, Australia
Accepted 17 May 2004
Abstract
Culture is one of the key words of the English language, in popular as well as scholarly discourse. It is ourishing in popular usage, with a 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-specic, 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
semantic primes such as PEOPLE , THINK , DO , LIVE , NOT , LIKE , THE SAME , and OTHER .
2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Abstract concepts; Lexical semantics; Natural semantic metalanguage; Wierzbicka; Culture
concept
1. Introduction
Williams (1976, p. 87) famously described culture as one of the two or three most
complicated words in the English language. Though there is no doubt an element of
Fax: +61 67 73 3735.

E-mail address: cgoddard@metz.une.edu.au
0388-0001/$ - see front matter 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2004.05.001
52
C. Goddard / Language Sciences 27 (2005) 5173
rhetorical overstatement in this dictum, I show in this study that the English word
culture indeed exhibits a complicated network of interlocking polysemic meanings.
My approach will be a lexicographicsemantic one, employing the natural semantic
metalanguage method of semantic description of Wierzbicka (1996), Goddard (1998)
and Goddard and Wierzbicka (2002). Using the method of reductive paraphrase
in semantic primes, I hope to bring new clarity to bear on the meaning of what is
undeniably a key word of the English language, in both popular and scholarly
discourse.
There is much to be gained from a systematic exploration of the abstract metacategories of English, such as culture, society, science, art, religion, politics, etc.
From a purely semantic point of view, such abstract words pose an intriguing,
and as far as I know, little tackled, analytical challenge. Since they constitute a
high-level language-specic taxonomy of human activity, articulating their meaning
structure in close detail would presumably shed much light on prevailing social and
cultural attitudes. Many such words are, furthermore, foundational terms of particular academic discourses: culture is the key word of anthropology, society the key
word for sociology, and so on. Of central interest is the fact that all these terms
are highly language/culture-specic. Even in other European languages the nearest
counterparts to culture, for example, such as German Kultur or Polish kultura, dier
signicantly to the English word, 1 and one could expect greater dierences in concepts from more distant languages, such as Mandarin Chinese wen2hua4 culture, cultivation or Malay kebudayaan culture, traditional culture. Similarly with the
English concept of science, its extreme culture-specicity is shown by the fact that
even a language as close as German lacks an exact equivalent. German Wissenschaft, roughly (systematic) knowledge, has a much broader range of application
which includes the humanities as well as science in the English sense. 2 The semantics
of such abstract metacategories is surely a compelling topic for sustained cross-linguistic and cross-cultural study. I intend to make a start here with the English word
culture.
As Bauman (1996, p. 9) observes in the opening passages of his book Contesting
Culture: No idea is as fundamental to an anthropological understanding of social
life as the concept of culture. At the same time, no anthropological term has spread
into public parlance and political discourse as this word has done over the past 20
years. Ironically, however, as this process has been under way the so-called culture
concept has been subject to sustained scrutiny and criticism in anthropology itself
(cf. Duranti, 1997; Kuper, 1999; Shweder, 2001). Among its alleged sins, as itemised
by Shweder, 2001, p. 3152), are: essentialism, primordialism, representationalism,
In the case of culture and related terms, a start has been made in classic studies such as Elias
(1978[1939]), but without the benet of modern methods of linguistic semantics.
2
With the aid of modiers one can distinguish Naturwissenschaften systematic knowledge of nature,
natural sciences from Geisteswissenschaften systematic knowledge of human spirit, humanistic sciences,
but the existence of these derived subcategories does not alter the fact that German has a broader overarching category lacking in English; plus, on close examination, neither of the German derived terms
precisely matches the English terminology of English either.
53
reication, idealism, positivism, functionalism, relativism, sexism, racism,

colonialism, Orientalism, and just plain old-fashioned stereotyping. 3
My primary focus in this study is not on specialised academic understandings of
the culture concept, but rather on the lexical semantics of the word culture as used in
contemporary non-technical written and spoken discourse. Most of the examples I
will cite come from Australian newspapers and magazines published in 20022003
(the abbreviations SMH and Aust refer to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian newspapers, respectively). A smaller number of (unsourced) examples represent personal observations by myself, usually from ephemeral sources, and the
remaining handful are drawn from recently published books intended for non-academic audiences. I will, however, have occasion to refer to intellectual critiques of
the culture concept to the extent that they can be connected with the semantic structure of the ordinary word culture.
As far as I know, no previous study has sought to bring the methods of linguistic
semantics to bear on the word culture. 4 The present study employs the natural
semantic metalanguage method originated by Wierzbicka (1972, 1996, 1999) (cf.
Goddard and Wierzbicka, 1994, 2002; Goddard, 1998). I will therefore be seeking
to articulate the various meanings of culture in the form of explanatory paraphrases
framed in a highly constrained metalanguage of some 60 simple semantic primes,
such as PEOPLE , THINK , DO , SAY , GOOD , BAD , BECAUSE , IF , and others. By using
such a small and controlled vocabulary (see Appendix A), the method aims to eliminate the circularity and obscurity which plague most dictionary denitions (and
most scholarly discussions), and to enable the maximum possible resolution of meaning. A growing body of evidence, accumulated over 20 years, indicates that the postulated primes are lexically encoded, as words or word-like elements, in all
languages. A large body of empirical semantic description has been conducted in this
framework, spanning domains such as emotions, speech acts, colours, concrete objects, value terms and a variety of grammatical phenomena, in many languages. 5
Before we get started, a brief historical overview will provide some useful orientation (cf. Williams, 1976; Kuper, 1999; Inglis, 2004). In its earliest English uses, culture was a noun of process, referring to the tending of crops, animals, or the like,
typically accompanied by a modier indicating the nature of the thing being cultivated. Presumably this meaning (roughly cultivating) remains with us in words such
as agriculture, horticulture, and viviculture, and expressions such as tissue culture,
yoghurt culture, cultured pearls, and so on. In the 16th century culture began to be used
about cultivating the human body through training, and then about cultivating the
3
For discussions consistent with the semantic orientation of the present study, see DAndrade (2001),
Eneld (2000), Goddard (2002) and Wierzbicka (1997, pp. 131). For a defence of the culture concept, see
Wierzbicka (in press).
4
Kroeber and Kluckhorn (1963[1952]) book Culture: A critical review of concepts and denitions was
focused on social science concepts of culture, rather than on ordinary, everyday uses of the word, and,
more importantly, they did not apply any principled or systematic analytical procedures.
5
A comprehensive bibliography is available at The NSM Homepage: www.une.edu.au/arts/LCL/
disciplines/linguistics/nsmpage.htm.
54
non-physical aspects of a person. Among the OEDs citations are to the culture and
prot of theyr myndes (Thomas More, c. 1516) and necessary for the culture of
good manners (Lennard, 1633). This self-cultivation meaning remained the predominant one till as late as the 19th century: a classic denition is that of Arnold
(1873): Culture, acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said
in the world.
In the late 19th century, things got more complicated. On the one hand, there
were extensions which broadened the usage of culture to take in a general state of
human intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development (roughly comparable to civilisation). More recently still, this line of development gave rise to the artistic works
and practices meaning, referring to such things as music, literature, painting, theatre and lm. On the other hand, a new anthropological usage of culture was
introduced into English by Tylor in his 1870 book Primitive Culture. 6 Tylor dened
culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
This sense subsequently ourished with the advent of modern social science, especially anthropology, before spilling out into popular discourse and spawning several
polysemic extensions. I will deal with these immediately in Section 2 below, and then
turn to the artistic works and practices meaning in Section 3.
2. Culture as ways of living, thinking, and behaving

2.1. The classical anthropological concept of culture and its immediate ospring
According to Kroeber and Kluckhorn (1963[1952]) (cf. Vermeersch, 1977), the
older or classical anthropological concept of culture combines as key components
of its meaning both mental states and processes and patterns of behaviour (habits, customs, ways of life). Clearly implicated are the semantic primes THINK and DO ,
and, if one can take expressions such as way of life at face value, the semantic prime
LIVE . Another key ingredient is the role of the precedents of the past, as highlighted
in classic denitions such as the whole complex of traditional behaviour (Margaret
Mead, 1937) and behaviour which in man is not given at birth (Ruth Benedict,
1947).
As discussed above, this idea of culture, or something very close to it, has since
migrated, so to speak, into ordinary English. To cite just two examples:
Williams (1976, pp. 9192) claims that this usage originated in specialised uses of German Kultur
under the inuence of Herder, but like other aspects of Williamss account, this is controversial (cf. Kuper,
1999). In any case, although Herder made some use of the term Kultur (in an earlier spelling Cultur,
reecting its origin as a French loan word), his primary concept was rather that of Volkgeist, cf. Johoda
(1993, pp. 7578). The modern meaning of German Kultur, which developed in German in opposition to
the French concept of civilisation (cf. Elias (1978[1939], pp. 134)), is signicantly dierent to any
contemporary meaning of English culture.
55
1. I loved being immersed in a dierent culture and having the chance to learn so
much about the Japanese people. It was great! (re. students holiday trip to
Japan).
2. After childbirth in the Chinese culture, the women are made to stay in bed and
basically do nothing but feed baby.
Equally, this older or classical concept of culture has attracted harsh criticism
within anthropology itself. Two quotations follow, and it is interesting to consider
them, not from the point of view of their validity as critiques, but in order to ask
what in the meaning of the term culture invites these complaints.
[T]he term seems to connote a certain coherence, uniformity and timelessness in
the meaning systems of a given group, and to operate rather like the earlier
concept of race in identifying fundamentally dierent, essentialized, and
homogenous social units (as when we speak about a culture). (Abu-Lughod
and Lutz, 1990, p. 9)
[cultural fundamentalism] reies culture conceived as a compact, bounded,
localised and historically rooted set of traditional values. (Stolcke, 1995, 4)
To begin with the issues of boundedness and localisation, various commentators have traced the origins of the classical concept of culture back to the 18th century, a time in which travel stories were popularising, among educated readers, the
existence of widely diering customs and values in places around the world. It was
the age of exploration and the age of colonialism, and the world was shrinking. Johoda (1993, p. 29) records that according to one detailed study, the total numbers of
travel books in the French language in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were 21, 78,
and 250, respectively: a large proportion of such books dealt with non-European
cultures, either oriental or concerned with the savages of America or Africa. The
image of the savage, albeit an unrealistic oneplayed an important role in Enlightenment ideas of human nature. 7 Herder, Humboldt, Voltaire, and other foundational Enlightenment thinkers all read and studied travel reports with the greatest
interest. My point is that the recognition that there were communities of morality
and belief very dierent than ours was linked at the beginning with geographical
dierence, i.e. with localisation. I would like to suggest that this feature is still preserved in the meaning of the English word culture, as found in expressions such as
Chinese culture, Samoan culture, Russian culture, Aboriginal culture, and so on.
Notice that canonical uses of this sense are associated with place-related descriptors (such as Chinese, Samoan, or Russian, derived from the names of countries), or
from other words, such as Aboriginal, with strongly place-related meanings. For this
meaning of culture, I propose explication [A1], composed exclusively in semantic
primes. The initial components in (a) are intended to model the fact that culture is
7
Palsson (1993, p. 6) pushes the institutionalism of the travel account back to the Middle Ages, saying
that it satised the desire to experience both dierence and the crossing of boundaries. He also mentions
that later, especially in the 19th century, there arose allied genres such as the semi-ethnographic novel, e.g.
Herman Melvilles1846 novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life.
56
a noun (which implies that it designates something) and that, as with many other
abstract nouns, there is a certain vagueness in its meaning. The referent (the something in question) is not described directly, but is only linked with a mental model
(when people say things about it, they are thinking about things like this). The components in (b1) and (b2) set up the presupposed existence of various far-ung geographical locations, each inhabited by a dierent kind of people, and each with a
distinctive way of living, thinking, and behaving. Subsequent sections attribute the
distinctive ways of living, thinking and behaving (characteristic of the people of a
particular region) to the inuence of precedent: the people of a particular place live,
think and behave as they do because people of the same kind have lived, thought and
behaved in these ways traditionally, i.e. for a long time before. This is not a fully
explicit reference to intergenerational transmission, but it comes close to it. Note that
section (d), which concerns ways of thinking, has two parts, corresponding to attitudes and to values, respectively.
[A1] (Samoan, Chinese, Russian, etc.) cultureA1=
a. something
when people say things about it, they are thinking about things like this:
b1. people live in many places
some of these places are far from here
many kinds of people live in these places, one kind of people in one place,
another kind of people in another place
b2. these many kinds of people dont live in the same way as people here live
they dont think about things in the same way as people here think about things
they dont do things in the same way as people here do things
c. people in one place live in one way, not in another way,
because other people of the same kind lived this way before for a long time
d. people in one place think about things in some ways, not in other ways
because other people of the same kind thought this way before for a long time
they think some things are good, they think some other things are not good
e. people in one place do things in some ways, not in other ways
because other people of the same kind did things this way before for a long time
In several ways, the structure of explication [A1] is consistent with modern critiques of the culture concept. First, it refers repeatedly to kinds of people, thereby
essentialising social units. 8 Second, although nothing in the explication rules out
them out, adaptation and change are not provided for explicitly and the overall
There may be a non-compositional link between the notion of a kind of people and a distinctive way
of living which is reproduced across time. In the natural world at least, the notion of kinds is centred
around species, which certainly do reproduce themselves across the generations.
57
phrasing certainly suggests coherence, uniformity and timelessness. Likewise,

although nothing in the explication rules out internal variability, the overall phrasing, with its emphasis on sameness, is suggestive of homogeneous social units.
Third, it may fairly be said that this concept does in a sense exoticise the Other, for
it assumes the viewpoint of people here, and envisages people and places far from
here in terms of their dierences from people here. The home-based aspect of the
notion of culture explains why in everyday usage culture tends to be seen as something that other people have. It is for this reason that getting students to accept
that they have a culture too is a necessary standard move in introductory anthropology courses and textbooks.
Nevertheless, it may well be questioned whether the relevant contemporary concept of culture is always bound to such a home-based point of view. While the oldfashioned or unsophisticated concept of culture explicated in [A1] is still alive and
well in popular usage, in more sophisticated discourse it is perfectly all right to speak
of, for example, American culture, Anglo culture, Western culture, and so on, i.e. to
apply the culture concept to ones home society as well as to others, on an equal footing, as it were. To cite just a single example:
3. He has argued that many exhibits [in the Australian National Museum] treat
white culture with mockery and irony while the treatment of indigenous culture
ranges from respect to reverence. European culture in Australia was largely portrayed as a series of disasters. (SMH 4-5/01/03, p. 13)
In recognition of this, it is necessary to posit a modied concept, as in [A2],
stripped of the home-based perspective and with a reduced emphasis on localisation.
For the most part, the relationship between [A1] and [A2] can be seen as one of
semantic generalisation, in the sense of the loss of some previous semantic material.
[A2] (white, European, Muslim, etc.) culturesA2=
a. something
b. people live in many places
another kind of people in another place
c. people of one kind live in one way, not in another way,
d. people of one kind think about things in some ways, not in other ways
e. people of one kind do things in some ways, not in other ways
because other people of the same kind did things this way before for a long
time
58
A smaller but still signicant change in [A2] is that in components (c)(e) the culture-bearing people are identied as people of one kind, rather than as people in
one place. Importantly, a link with places is retained in component (b): the notion
of dierent kinds of people is initially introduced by way of localisationas if, ideally, dierent kinds of people live in dierent placesbut once having been introduced in this fashion, subsequent references to people of one kind are not
necessarily tied to any one place. On this model, one could perhaps say that there
is an implication that white culture or Chinese culture, for example, belong somewhere or originated somewhere, but without any suggestion that they are presently
conned to any single location. In other respects the concept explicated in [A2] is
identical to that of [A1]: an historically rooted way of living, thinking, and behaving attributed to essentialised and homogenous social units. 9
These explications help explain why this particular concept of culture does not sit
well with modern urban multiculturalism, in which many dierent groups are all living together, and not only that, mixing all the time in schools, in shops, and on the
street. This is not really consonant with the notion of geographical separation
(implying social separation) which forms part of the classical culture concept. The
explications also make it clear why those who believe that the world, or at least their
patch of it, has passed into a fragmented, globalised postmodern condition, where
cultural inuences are interpenetrating, cross-cutting, and in constant ux, no longer
believe that the concept of culture has any applicability. Not only is there no longer
the stability implied by the explication, but equally there is no longer any localisation, any grounding in place. 10
2.2. Promoting subcultures to cultures
In contemporary usage a modied concept of culture has detached itself even
more denitively from localisation, e.g. in expressions like youth culture, gay culture,
Kid culture [a book title], redneck culture, ocker culture, drug culture. Here the principle of dierentiation has shifted entirely to the notion of dierent kinds of people,
9
In some academic writing an even more generalised concept of culture may exist, seen as a generic
attribute of the human species. For example: Unlike that of other species, the human mind has a collective
counterpart: culture. . . we have evolved an adaptation for living in culture (Donald, 2001, p. xiii); There is no
contradiction between a naturalistic, biologically informed approach to human cognition and the rcognition of
a constitutive role in it of culture (Sinha, 2002, p. 273), cf. McGrew (1998)). This further meaning, which we
could designate [A3], appears to contain a dierent (b) componentpeople are not like other kinds of
living things, while at the same time disregarding localisation and the existence of dierent kinds of
people. Stripped down versions of subsequent components could be: people live in some ways, not in
other ways, because other people live in these ways; people think about things in some ways, not in other
ways, because other people think in these ways; people do things in some ways, not in other ways, because
other people do things in these ways.
10
Richards (1994) says of the classic anthropology of Cliord Geertz that it depended fundamentally
on the evocation of a locale: his classic studies of Morocco, for example, are as much about Morocco
(the place) as about Moroccans (the people). Against this, Richards (1994, p. 241) counterposes the
postcolonial vision of Homi Bhabha, remarking: A sense of place is the rst denial in the writings of
dislocated postcolonial writers.
59
each with a distinctive way of living, thinking and behaving. A new component representing the idea of co-association (people of one kind do many things with other
people of the same kind) takes over the explanatory role of historical precedent. In
this usage of culture, the assumption is that people of a particular kind (youth, gays,
kids, drug-addicts, or whatever) live, think and behave in certain shared ways, because other people of the same kind live, think and behave similarly. Needless to
say, the essentialising and homogenising implications remain.
[B] (youth, gay, redneck) cultureB=
a. something
b. there are many kinds of people
people of one kind do many things with other people of the same kind
because other people of the same kind live this way
d. people of one kind think about things in some ways, not in other ways,
because other people of the same kind think this way
because other people of the same kind do things this way
Presumably this culture meaning is a kind of descendent of the term subculture
(which seems to be becoming obsolete). I am not exactly suggesting that the meaning
of subculture has shifted to become a sub-sense of culture itself, because the meaning
of the term subculture must contain an additional component, linked with the prex
sub-, which explicitly refers to the status of the people concerned as a part or section
(some of) of the larger society. The suggestion is rather, as Hartman (1997, p. 49)
puts it, that there has been a tendency to promote[s] all subcultures to cultures
by dropping the prex sub-.
Paradoxical as it may seem, I believe that explication [B] is compatible with the
expression mainstream culture, because the term mainstream culture in a sense
acknowledges the existence of subcultures or minority cultures, even as it excludes
them.
2.3. Small cultures
The cover-term small cultures is taken from Holliday (1999). In this meaning,
the word culture refers to the shared mindset and behaviours of people who spend
a lot of time doing the same kinds of things, i.e. who share the same occupation or
pastime, or live in the same kind of institution. A notable early usage (possibly innovative) was Snow (1964) famous dictum that It is dangerous to have two cultures
which cant or dont communicate, referring to the gulf between those working in
science and in the humanities. Since then this kind of usage has proliferated to the
60
extent that one commentator (Hartman, 1997, p. 30) has likened it to a linguistic
weed. Examples include phrases such as the following:
4. (a) institutional culture, occupational culture, police culture, student culture, corporate culture, ABC culture, beach culture, prison culture, health club culture, gym culture, culture of the classroom, the culture of the Catholic Church in Sydney
(b) culture of bullying, a culture of alcoholism and drug-taking, argument culture [a
Deborah Tannen book title], pill-popping culture, surf culture, gun culture
(c) culture of deference, culture of complaint [a Robert Hughes book title], culture
of privacy, culture of violence, culture of corruption, culture of secrecy and suppression, culture of indecision, one-bullet, one-kill culture (i.e. attitude behind the sniper
culture)
The meaning occurs with modiers (an adjective, noun, or postposed genitive) in
various functions: identifying a social domain e.g. institutional culture, prison culture, and the other examples in (4a), or a characteristic behaviour or attitude attributed to the people concerned, e.g. argument culture, culture of bullying, culture of
deference, and the other examples in (4b) and (4c). That these various usages involve
the same meaning is clear from double barrelled expressions like the ABCs culture
of entrenched resistance to change, the police culture of secrecy and Ansetts culture of
cost-cutting.
The extension of culture to so-called occupational cultures or institutional cultures is a very natural one. In a study titled Police culture, Chen (1999) explains
that social scientists who studied routine police work have for decades postulated
the existence of a distinctive police occupational culture. She cites a seminal early
statement about the elements of this postulated culture, which are strikingly similar
in nature (rules, ideology, standards, models, customs, etc.) to those we have
seen previously:
long-standing rules of thumb, a somewhat special language and ideology
which help to edit a members everyday experiences, shared standards of relevance as to the critical aspects of the work, matter-of-fact prejudices, models for street-level etiquette and demeanour, certain customs and rituals
suggestive of how members are to relate not only to each other but to outsiders, and a sort of residual category consisting of the assorted miscellany of
some rather plain police horse sense. (Manning and Van Maanen, 1978,
p. 267)
The small culture concept is extremely versatile, since it can be applied to just
about any set of people who undertake common activities. Some less standardised
examples are given below.
5. Theres not only a culture of bullying, theres a culture of being men, being macho,
not talking about your feelings (at Trinity School). (Telegraph, 9/02/00)
6. These two phenomena come together in tittie bar culture; Houston has more
tittie bars than any other city in the world. (Aust Magazine, 10-11/03/02, p. 26)
61
7. Today, for example, the new culture of the Internet and the rave/rap/DJ ethos is
rising with the New Economy... (SMH Spectrum, 10/03/01, p. 10)
The meaning can be stated as in explication [C]. Notice that the notion of there
being dierent kinds of people is no longer present. The principle of classication
and social segregation is rather a matter of shared activity. As Holliday (1999) puts
it:
The idea of small cultures. . . is non-essentialist in that it is not related to the
essence of ethnic, national or international entities. Instead it relates to any
cohesive social grouping. . . Small culture is thus more to do with activities taking place within a group than with the nature of the group itself. (Holliday,
1999, p. 240, 250)
The explication begins with the assumption, in component (b1), that although
people in general undertake all sorts of activities, some people in a given place spend
a lot of time doing things with other people in the same place. According to component (b2), this association sets these particular people apart from others in terms of
their attitudes and ways of going about things. Notice the resemblance to a similar
contrastive component in explication [A1] for the traditional culture concept.
Components (c) and (d) spell out the idea that the people concerned share certain
attitudes, values, and ways of behaving, in similar fashion to previous explications.
Notice also that intra-group aliation in components (c) and (d) is no longer specied in terms of other people of the same kind, with its essentialist implications, but
rather in terms of other people in the same place.
[C] (place-Xs) cultureC (of Y) e.g. Trinity Schools culture of bullying=
a. something
b1. people in this place do many things with other people in the same place
b2. these people dont think about things in the same way as other people think
about things
they dont do things in the same ways as other people do things
c. these people think about things in some ways, not in other ways,
because other people in the same place think this way
d. these people do many things in some ways, not in other ways,
because other people in the same place do these things this way
The reference to a place in component (b1), i.e. people in this place. . ., and subsequently, could be queried. It is true that sometimes (not very often in my collection
of examples) there is no explicit place name in the immediate context, but I believe
that one could always be supplied from context, if necessary. If we are to think of a
62
certain set of people as constituting a social grouping, as Holliday terms it, it

seems to be a conceptual necessary that they must all be in one place, on the understanding that this place can be very broad and vague. If someone starts talking about
police culture, for instance, it is always legitimate to ask what police culture? or
police culture where?, and the answer will come back police culture in Australia
or police culture in general (i.e. everywhere), or whatever. Even an expression like
the new culture of the Internet implies from a semantic point of view that the people
concerned are in a certain particular somewhere, i.e. on the internet. (Indeed, the
spatialisation of the new media of shared electronic communication is quite striking; cf. terms such as cyberspace, chatroom, and so on).
As mentioned, in the cultureC meaning the term can be supplied with modiers
which indicate a particular entrenched attitude, value orientation, or behaviour,
i.e. a particular way of thinking or acting. Some examples:
8. [They] appeared seriously traumatised and severely aected by a culture of selfharm (e.g. slicing of wrists and suicide threats). (SMH, 3-4/08/02, p. 33)
9. We would be very concerned if the growth of a customer culture in universities
were to lead to examples of plagiarism being tolerated and/or swept under the
carpet. (SMH 24/02/01, p. 6)
10. Otherwise, all we will get is a culture of managed and correct behaviour with no
progress in developing moral consciousness in adult/child relationships (Aust.
19/07/02, p. 10)
In the examples so far, the overall tone can be characterised as negative but the
construction also occurs (albeit less commonly) in contexts where the speakers attitude is positive, as, for example, when universities are urged to embrace a culture of
excellence or (sigh!) a culture of entrepreneurialism. There are also cases where there
seems to be no obvious value judgement involved. In (12), for example, the writers
intention seems to be purely descriptive and explanatory, and not at all judgmental.
This is true despite the fact that if taken in isolation the expression culture of criticism
would probably sound negative (presumably, because the word criticism implies the
idea of conict). A context-dependent tone, either positive or negative, can easily
colour an expression of this kind. For example, in (13) the expression culture of
academic freedom is presented as a source of problems and hence seems to pick up
a negative cast, while in (14) the expression audiovisual culture acquires a negative
cast for similar reasons. These context-dependent eects are not part of the semantic
invariant.
11. It emerged during the 17th century, when Louis XIV built a culture of beauty,
etiquette and elegance which still dictates almost every detail of French life,. . .
(Turnbull, 2002, p. 135)
12. There is a culture of criticism in France which means that people do not hold
back from telling you that something is bad. (Turnbull, 2002, p. 248)
13. The culture of academic freedom has perhaps led to inappropriate devolution of
powers and lack of internal control. (SMH 24-25/08/02, 2002)
63
14. The book is dead, crow the champions of audiovisual culture. (Devine, 1998,
p. 19)
Another indication that the construction is not inherently valanced in either the
negative or positive direction comes in the form of paired expressions. For example,
in an article about business management, Charan (2001) explains how a culture of
indecision (also culture of indecisiveness) can be turned around into a culture of decisive behaviour (also culture of decisiveness). I conclude with some more novel and idiosyncratic modifying expressions. 11
15. a culture of putting on a happy smiling face and pretending the problems arent
there (12/07/02, ABC morning radio)
16. Were talking about the backs-against-the-wall culture that sees every change as
an assault on the ABCs independence and therefore its credibility.
17. Munck describes how Marriot transformed its see and be seen culture by
implementing an initiative dubbed Management Flexibility at several of its
hotels. (Munck, 2001, p. 21)
3. Culture as artistic works and practices, etc.
This meaning (or set of meanings) appears in expressions such as high culture,
popular culture, the pursuit of culture, and so on. As mentioned in Section 1, it has
followed quite a dierent track of historical development to the anthropological
concepts of culture, and, as we shall see, it is semantically very dierent in its structure and content. Culture in this sense can used as an independent noun in the following examples:
11
In high register academic and intellectual contexts a related usage is found in expressions like gender
culture, speech culture, work culture, culture of sex, culture of death. Here the modier identies a certain
domain of activity: gender relations, speech, work, death, sex, death, etc. For example, the book The
Culture of Sex in Ancient China (Goldin, 2002) is about how people in Ancient China thought about sex,
what their sexual practices were, and so on. This meaning, which we can designate as [C2], seems to call for
a (b) component like people in this place all do things of this kind with other people at some times; that is,
it refers to certain kinds of things which concern everyone in some implied social domain, and which call
for some shared activities at some time. Subsequent components refer to attitudes, values and practices
about this domain of activity. Holliday (1999)) groups this meaning with cultureC, under the single term
small cultures. The two concepts cannot be subsumed under a single explication, however, because in
the cultureC2 of X, the term X refers to a domain of activity, whereas in the cultureC of X, it indicates an
entrenched attitude, value orientation or behaviour. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that certain
phrases are susceptible to both interpretations. For example, the expression cultureC of death was used by
Pope John Paul II (1995) in his condemnation of the widespread acceptance of abortion in secular Western
society. The expression the cultureC2 of death appears in following example, which is the opening remark in
a review of a book about death in Australia: This is not a book about the culture of death or mortuary
custom (ANU Reporter 33(13), Oct. 2002, no pagination). The expression here refers a set of attitudes and
practices for dealing with death (analogous to the culture of sex).
64
18. [It was] a crime against culture (UN spokesman condemning the Talibans
destruction of giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan) (Aust. 14/03/01, p. 1)
19. As we talk about the various strands of cultureboth popular and classical
that run through the books, Fforde confesses he is always surprised when readers much younger than himself enjoy them. (SMH Spectrum 28-29/12/02, p. 20)
It is found in the names of ocial bodies such as the Department of Culture and
the Arts (Western Australia) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (UK),
in newspaper section headings such as Arts and Culture, Lifestyle and Culture, in
specialised expressions like pop culture and lm culture; in references to cultural
events, cultural activities, cultural facilities, cultural institutions, and so on. The adjective cultured, as in a cultured person, and the expression a person of culture, also display this usage.
Culture in this sense can be used at dierent levels of generality and in relation to
dierent subjects. On the one hand, it can be used to designate general processes regarded as conducive to the improvement of the human mind and spirit (Eliot,
1962, 21), and to refer collectively to various works and activities (of art, music, literature, and so on) regarded as contributing to this process. On the other hand, culture can be attributed to a place. For example, one of the mottos of Armidale, NSW,
is City of culture and learning; see also example (20). More commonly, culture is denied to a place, as in (21) and (22).
20. In both culture and education, the city [Liverpool, Sydney] is about to boom,
with a refurbuishment of the Casula Powerhouse, which will include a specialist
book shop, gallery, and a 250-seat theatre. (SMH 6/01/03, p. 4)
21. Cairns is not a great place for culture.
22. Low rents but not much culture [comment re. a poor neighbourhood]
Similarly, culture can be attributed to a person, as in a person of culture, or denied, as in example (23).
23. . . . when you really scratch the surface and see whats in there, a lot of the time
you discover that there really isnt much there. Not much culture, not a great
deal of intellectual complexity.
It is important to note that although the arts may be the most salient components of culture (in the usage under discussion), the concepts of culture and the arts
are by no means co-extensive. For example, culture could include knowledge of philosophy and history, and other intellectual activities, and it seems to imply a certain
renement of sensibility and manners. As Eliot (1962, p. 23) insisted, an artist, writer
or other contributor to culture is not a person of culture if they are narrow in their
interests, or crude, or dull.
According to explication [D] below, the mental model associated with cultureD begins with the idea, set out in section (b), that there are certain things whose existence
is thought to be good for people, but not for reasons of survival or for practical utilitarian purposes. These components position culture, so to speak, above mundane
65
concerns and establish its benecial or enriching potential for humanity at large.
Skipping down to the components in (d), we can see why. A person can benet
(something good can happen in a person) if they see, hear or think about things
of this kind. The nature of the potential benet is not specied: it could be some kind
of personal growth or development, or perhaps simply an enjoyable experience. 12
The wording is intended to allow for the existence of various kinds of cultural products (paintings, music, books, and so on) which can be experienced in various ways,
and even to allow for intangible things, such as philosophical ideas, to count as cultural stimuli.
The component in (c) species that human agency is necessary for the stu of
culture to come into existence, with the proviso that not everyone can do these
things. The wording is deliberately vague for several reasons. First, it has to be compatible with the existence of various intangible cultural matter, such as ideas and performances (a reference to making things would therefore be over-specic). Second,
though one might think at rst blush that cultural matter has to be produced for the
purpose, so to speak, this is actually not the case, as shown by the example in (18)
above. The giant Buddha statues were originally made for religious rather than artistic reasons, but the UN spokesperson evidently felt that their existence was a good
thing for the world (i.e. for people in general), such that their deliberate destruction
by the Taliban was a crime against culture. Similarly, museums and art galleries often
feature exhibitions of ne furniture, clothing, and decorative art from dierent historical periods, which were not necessarily produced with primarily artistic motivations. The phrasing of component (c) is sucient to require human agency, without
insisting on any particular kind of motive.
Finally, section (e) concerns people who pursue culture, i.e. who do many
things because they want the benets of cultural experience. These people are described as having signicant knowledge about a range of things, and as having certain ways of thinking and behaving, on account of their cultural experiences. Notice
that the initial expression some people implies that cultured people are a subset of
society at large. This set of components is compatible with the implication of social
superiority attaching to this meaning of culture, parodied by terms like Kulcha and
culture vulture (Williams, 1976, p. 92).
[E] cultureD=
a. something
b. it is good for people if some things exist
not because people cant live if they dont have these things
not because people cant do other things if they dont have these things
12
In the component something good can happen in a person, the word in can be regarded as an
allolex or contextual variant of the semantic prime INSIDE . That is, the overall meaning is the same as
something good can happen inside a person. I have preferred the simpler phrasing for easier readability.
66
c. things of this kind cant exist if some people dont do some things
not everyone can do these things
d. something good can happen in a person when this person sees things of this kind
something good can happen in a person when this person hears things of this kind
something good can happen in a person when this person thinks about things of
this kind
e. some people do many things because they want things like this to happen to them
these people know much about many things because of this
these people think about things in some ways, not other ways, because of this
these people do things in some ways, not other ways, because of this
At rst, the existence of the expression popular culture (referring to popular, or
even commercial, art forms such as movies, television, paperback novels, comics,
and so on) might seem to run counter to explication [D], which has a distinctly high
culture tone about it, especially in the noble-sounding rst line of component (b),
the implication of specialised skills in component (c), and in the social selectiveness and social superiority implied by the components in (e). On closer inspection, however, the expression popular culture is actually conrmatory of [D]. This
is because popular culture is a xed expression, which works precisely by cancelling
part of the normal presuppositions of the word culture itself. (Without the adjective,
culture cannot refer to popular cultural products.)
Explication [D] is designed to t general uses of culture as an independent noun, in
examples such as a crime against culture and the pursuit of culture. How does it fare
with uses where culture is attributed (or not attributed) to a place or to a person, as
in (20)(23) above? Essentially, these uses are conned to these particular grammatical frames, and the meaning of the word in these contexts can be easily derived from
the general meaning given in [D]. If a place is said to have (or not have) culture, this
means that the kinds of thing referred to in components (b)(d) can (or cannot) be
found in that place. If a person is said to have (or not have) culture, this means that
the person matches (or does not match) the description given in (e).
An additional usage is shown in (24), where culture refers to activities such as
going to art galleries and concerts, viewing historic buildings, and so on. Here the
word refers to the activities of experiencing culture, as set out in component (d).
24. There is a lot to see in Rome [Sistine Chapel, Vatican museum, Forum, Colosseum, etc.], but as we said there is only so much culture we can take.
4. Concluding remarks
In this study I have identied ve dierent senses of the word culture in contemporary English, and presented formal semantic explications for each of them. Clearly
four of these meanings are in a relationship of close polysemy, in the sense that certain individual components of meaning recur, in the style of a theme with variations,
67
across the various meanings. They can be seen as extensions of the classical concept
of cultureA1 as, roughly speaking, the distinctive ways of living, thinking and behaving of dierent kinds of people in far-away locations, e.g. Samoan culture. By eliminating the implicitly home-based perspective, this meaning was generalised to
take in the distinctive ways of living, thinking and behaving of any localised kind
of people (not excluding ourselves), the meaning identied here as cultureA2 as in
European culture. Subsequently, subgroups within the home society (youth, gays,
kids, etc.) were identied as dierent kinds of people, each with its own subculture,
and this mediated the rise of cultureB as in youth culture or gay culture. Though in
this meaning the principle of localisation lost its prominence, it made a comeback
of sorts in cultureC. This focuses on a collectivity of people who need not live
together in a single place, but who nevertheless do many things together and are
seen as sharing distinctive attitudes and behaviours, as in police culture or the culture
of secrecy. As for the fth meaning, the artistic works and practices meaning cultureD it bears little relation to the others, having undergone a more or less independent historical development. The explications are tabulated for reference in
Appendix B.
For some readers, the formal semantic explications will have been heavy-going. Despite their simplicity at the level of individual phrases and clauses, lengthy explications
framed entirely in semantic primes require a certain measure of con-centration
and reection to take in and understand as a whole. Questions such as the following
naturally arise: Are such long and involved explications really necessary? What do
they add to the informal explanation given in the surrounding text?
To begin with the issue of the length and complexity of the explications, in my
view this simply has to be accepted as an empirical nding about the semantics of
the word culture. The reaction one sometimes hears, along the lines of there must
be something wrong, it cant be as complicated as that, seems to me to be an attitude which is anti-scientic, in the sense that it places a higher value on preconceptions than on careful and methodical analysis. I do not mean to claim that my
analyses cannot be improved. No doubt they can be rened, and any serious proposals to this eect are to be welcomed. It is suciently clear, however, that the semantics of the word culture, in its various interrelated meanings, has a certain inherent
informational complexity which can be revealed, but not reduced, by faithful semantic analysis in ne-grained detail in terms of semantic primes.
As for why we need this level of ne-grained detail, while many readers may nd
explanations framed in academic English easier to process than those framed in
semantic primes, this apparent ease of interpretation is deceptive. It depends on
our specialised abilities to understand a complex, language-specic (and register-specic) code, involving terms such as patterns of behaviour, mental states and processes, localisation, historically transmitted precedents, cohesive social
grouping, artistic works and practices, and so on. For ease of exposition it would
be foolish not to take advantage of such terms with a readership which can be assumed to comprehend academic English uently, but in reality each of these terms
is itself a tightly knotted bundle of language-specic semantic complexity. They
are entirely unsuitable as a medium for the systematic documentation of meaning
68
structure, both because they are complex (and hence do not allow for maximum resolution of meaning) and because they are language-specic (and hence cannot be
transposed cleanly into other languages). Using empirically established semantic
primes as the medium of explication, on the other hand, obliges one to analyse all
the way down to the maximum resolution or granularity of meaning, and to do so
in terms which are readily transposable across all human languages, thus freeing
the formal representation of meaning from the grip of the English language.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Anna Wierzbicka for many helpful discussions about earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for Language
Sciences who made a number of helpful suggestions.
Appendix A. Table of semantic primes (after Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2002)

Substantives:
Determiners:
Quantiers:
Evaluators:
Descriptors:
Intensier:
Mental/experiential predicates:
Speech:
Actions, events, movement:
Existence and possession:
Life and death:
Time:
I , YOU , SOMEONE (PERSON ), PEOPLE ,

(THING ), BODY
THIS , THE SAME , OTHER
ONE , TWO , SOME , ALL , MUCH/MANY
GOOD , BAD
BIG , SMALL
SOMETHING
VERY
THINK , KNOW , WANT , FEEL , SEE , HEAR
SAY , WORDS , TRUE
DO , HAPPEN , MOVE
THERE IS
(EXIST ),
HAVE
LIVE , DIE
WHEN
(TIME ),
NOW , BEFORE , AFTER ,
A LONG TIME , A SHORT TIME , FOR SOME TIME ,

MOMENT
Space:
WHERE
(PLACE ),
HERE , ABOVE , BELOW , FAR ,
NEAR , SIDE , INSIDE , TOUCHING
Logical concepts:
Augmentor:
Taxonomy, partonomy
Similarity:
NOT , MAYBE , CAN , BECAUSE , IF

MORE
KIND , PART
LIKE
(AS ,
WAY )
Exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes.

They can be morphologically complex.
69
They can have combinatorial variants, i.e. allolexes.

Each prime has a well-specied set of grammatical (combinatorial) properties.
Appendix B. Explications with explanatory annotations

[A1]: As in the other explications, component (a) identies the meaning as something linked with the mental model spelt out in the subsequent components. (b1)
sets out the assumption that there are many kinds of people each living a place
of its own, while (b2) adds the assumption that these dierent kinds of people live,
think and behave dierently from people here. Components (c)(e) attribute to the
people of each place a distinctive way of life, a distinctive set of attitudes and values,
and distinctive ways of doing things, on account of historical precedent, i.e. because
other people of the same kind lived (thought, behaved) in this way before for a long
time.
[A1] (Samoan, Chinese, Russian, etc.) cultureA1=
a. something
b1. people live in many places
some of these places are far from here
another
kind of people in another place
b2. these many kinds of people dont live in the same way as people here live
they dont think about things in the same way as people here think about things
they dont do things in the same way as people here do things
c. people in one place live in one way, not in another way,
d. people in one place think about things in some ways, not in other ways
because other people of the same kind thought this way before for a long
time
because other people of the same kind thought this way before for a long
time
e. people in one place do things in some ways, not in other ways
time
[A2] is a more general concept than [A1], stripped of the implicit home-based
perspective in the second line of (b1) and the entire bundle of components in (b2).
Relatedly, in components (c)(e) the people concerned are identied, not in terms
of location (people in one place), but as people of one kind.
70
[A2] (white, European, Muslim, etc.) cultureA2=

a. something
b. people live in many places
many kinds of people live in these places, one kind of people in one place, another
kind of people in another place
d. people of one kind think about things in some ways, not in other ways
time
[B] diers from [A1] and [A2] in several interrelated ways. Component (b) recognises the existence of dierent kinds of people without reference to localisation. Instead there is reference to co-association: people of one kind doing many things
together. Components (c)(d) have lost the implication of historical transmission.
The people in question live, think and behave as they do because other people of
the same kind live, think and behave similarly.
[B] (youth, gay, redneck) cultureB=
a. something
b. there are many kinds of people
people of one kind do many things with other people of the same kind
because other people of the same kind live this way
d. people of one kind think about things in some ways, not in other ways,
because other people of the same kind do things this way
In structure, explication [C] partly resembles [B], but there are two important differences in content. First, the reference to dierent kinds of people has been replaced by reference to people in a place doing things together; second, although
the reference to shared ways of thinking and behaving persists, the attribution of
shared ways of living is absent. Like [A2], the explication has a distinctiveness
component in (b2).
71
[C] (place-Xs) cultureC (of Y) e.g. Trinity Schools culture of bullying=

a. something
b1. people in this place do many things with other people in the same place
b2. these people dont think about things in the same way as other people think
about things
they dont do things in the same ways as other people do things
c. these people think about things in some ways, not in other ways,
d. these people do many things in some ways, not in other ways,
because other people in the same place do these things this way
As explained in the main body of the paper, the concept explicated in [D] bears
little direct relationship, either semantically or historically, to the others. There is
one semantic link, however, in the nal two lines of component (e), which essentially
state that cultured people have certain characteristic attitudes and behaviours on
account of their cultural experiences.
[D] cultureD e.g. the pursuit of culture=
a. something
b. it is good for people if some things exist
not because people cant live if they dont have these things
not because people cant do other things if they dont have these things
c. things of this kind cant exist if some people dont do some things
not everyone can do these things
d. something good can happen in a person when this person sees things of this kind
something good can happen in a person when this person hears things of this kind
something good can happen in a person when this person thinks about things of
this kind
e. some people do many things because they want things like this to happen to them
these people know much about many things because of this
these people think about things in some ways, not other ways, because of this
these people do things in some ways, not other ways, because of this
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Language Sciences 27 (2005) 5173

The lexical semantics of culture

School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, University of New England,

Fax: +61 67 73 3735.

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reication, idealism, positivism, functionalism, relativism, sexism, racism,

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2. Culture as ways of living, thinking, and behaving

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phrasing certainly suggests coherence, uniformity and timelessness. Likewise,

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certain set of people as constituting a social grouping, as Holliday terms it, it

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Appendix A. Table of semantic primes (after Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2002)

I , YOU , SOMEONE (PERSON ), PEOPLE ,

NOW , BEFORE , AFTER ,

A LONG TIME , A SHORT TIME , FOR SOME TIME ,

HERE , ABOVE , BELOW , FAR ,

NEAR , SIDE , INSIDE , TOUCHING

NOT , MAYBE , CAN , BECAUSE , IF

Exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes.

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They can have combinatorial variants, i.e. allolexes.

Appendix B. Explications with explanatory annotations

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[A2] (white, European, Muslim, etc.) cultureA2=

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[C] (place-Xs) cultureC (of Y) e.g. Trinity Schools culture of bullying=

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