Language as a Symbolic Culture Code

Abstract

The article aims to study the culture codes depicted in English postmodern discourse verbalized by phraseological units. The objectives of this paper are to disclose quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the phraseological units in Fowles’ “The Collector”, specify the culture codes actualized in them, and provide their semantic classification. The principal research methods are induction, deduction, synthesis, content, contextual, componential, and parametric analyses, the analysis of dictionary definitions, descriptive and quantitative methods. The current study results suggest that the imagery of Fowles’ “The Collector” is created through somatic, artefactual, temporal, spatial, natural, spiritual, zoomorphic, quantitative, and other culture codes. The study demonstrated that the phraseological units with somatic components are the most numerous in the analyzed corpus. They refer to a person’s mental or emotional state, physical appearance, and his/her adaptation to the social environment, functioning as symbols of national specificity and identity. Furthermore, the somatic idioms with negative connotations prevail over those positively marked. Cultural codes within each group are linked based on similar senses, concepts, or ideas compared to material objects. Thus, an in-depth linguocultural analysis of phraseologisms modelling the English world picture would not be complete without identifying the existing culture codes.