摘要：How much does language influence how we think? How far are the categories of our language contingent and culture-specific? Few questions are of greater significance to the social sciences. In this paper we attempt to demonstrate that linguistic semantics can address these questions with rigour and precision, by analysing some examples of cultural 'key words' in several languages. We want to argue for two complementary positions: on the one hand, that there are enormous differences in the semantic structuring of different languages and that these linguistic differences greatly influence how people think; but on the other, that all languages share a small set of 'universal concepts'. which can provide a solid basis for cross-cultural understanding and for the culture-independent formulation of philosophical problems.
