Abstract:
 A language not only expresses facts, ideas, events, but also reflects the people’s attitudes, beliefs, world outlooks etc. In a word, language expresses cultural reality. A language, as a system of signs with their own cultural substances and values, may be viewed as a symbol of social identity. In this sense, language symbolizes cultural reality. In addition, culture affects its people’s imagination or common dreams which are mediated through the language and reflected in their life. Although language and culture are intertwined, the relationship is not analogous to that of structures and processes. Rather, culture is a wider system that completely includes language as a subsystem. The reflection of language to culture is that of part to whole.
Word meaning is not monogeneous but a composite consisting of different components, which are known in familiar terms as different types of meaning. Generally, word meaning can be classified into grammatical meaning and lexical meaning. Then the lexical meaning itself embraces two components: conceptual meaning and associative meaning. Conceptual meaning is the meaning given in the dictionary and forms the core of word meaning. As for the associative meaning, it can be divided into four categories: connotative, stylistic, affective and collocative meaning. This paper mainly discusses the associative meaning.
Cultural differences cause the different word meanings. Culture is composed of many aspects such as custom, value, psychology and other factors. Besides, every nation has its own life style and cultural tradition. Those elements will have a great effect on language through shaping the culture. In the paper, the author will use the examples to show how these cultural reasons affect the language. This will help to analyze the differences of word meanings.

Key words: culture; lexical meaning; word meaning; cultural differences

摘  要：
语言不仅仅表达了事实，观点或事件，同时也反映了人的态度，信仰和世界观等等。总之，语言表达了文化的现实。语言，作为一个有着自己文化主旨和价值的符号体系，可能被看做是一种社会认知。在这种意义上，语言代表了文化现实。此外，文化影响了人们的想象和共同的梦想，这些想象和梦想通过语言来传播，因反应着他们的生活。尽管，语言和文化交织在一起，但是它们的结构和过程并不相同。然而，文化是一个较大的系统，语言是它下面的分支系统。语言和文化的关系就像部分与整体的关系。
词义不是单一的，而是有不同的部分组成的，就是众所周知的不同的词义类型。通常，词义可以分为语法意义和词汇意义。其次，词汇意义本身包括了两个方面：概念意义和联想意义。概念意义是指词典中给定的意义，是词语的核心意义。而联想意义又可以分为四种：内涵意义，文体意义，情感意义和搭配意义。本篇论文主要讨论联想意义。
文化的差异引起词汇的差异。而文化本身有很多方面组成，例如习俗，价值观，心理以及其他因素。然而每个民族都有自己的生活方式和文化传统，这些因素通过塑造了不同的文化而影响语言的发展。在本篇论文中，作者会通过例子来展示文化因素是如何影响语言的。这会有利于分析词义的不同。

关键词：文化；词汇学；词义；文化差异