【正文】 ent cultural values in the residences of Chinese and British from the view of cultural semantics. It is mainly divided into three parts. The first part concerns the theories of my paper. The second part is about the architecture as the cultural product reflects the culture and conventions of the people who’s living in. Then a brief account on the main features of the Chinese and British residences is given in the third part. And the next part is about the reason of the distinctions and different conventions resulted in the two styles of residences shaped by the values of individualism and collectivism. 2. Theoretical foundation: culture and cultural semantics Comparative study of cultures There have been over four hundred definitions made for culture according to the Course of Culturology. Here are two typical ones in the field. 淮陰師范學(xué)院 本科生畢業(yè)論文（設(shè)計(jì)） 2 They take that of the British anthropologist Edward Burt Tylor as the first definition of culture. He said: “Culture ... is that plex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” And defined it as “Culture is made up of exterior and interior behavior patterns. These behavior patterns are obtained and transferred through symbolic signals. The culture represents the remarkable achievements of the group of human, including the embodiment in manmade things。 while British type of detached houses disclose the individualism of the culture. Culturepattern, which is the domination of its cultureproduct, is the narrow sense of culture. The pattern is embodied in all its products and is the abstract image of the achievements. This sense of culture concerns the characteristics and status of the interior structure to make out the internal cause of the external appearances of the cultural products. For instance, because of Chinese value of collectivism, the people would like to live together and the houses are connected together to form a courtyard. And as a result of the individualism, the British prefer the detached houses separated far from each other. 淮陰師范學(xué)院 本科生畢業(yè)論文（設(shè)計(jì)） 3 Culture can be divided into two parts, cultureproduct and culturepattern. Then which sense is the parison studying on? Generally speaking, such study concerns the culture pattern through paring the features of the cultural products. For example, this paper deals with the features of Chinese and British architectures to study the cultures. Then, to find out the distinctions of the architectures is on the level of studying the cultureproduct. However, in order to pare the different cultures, it should be researched on the culture pattern which conducted the distinctions, that is, different values of individualism and collectivism. Cultural semantics Culture is a ethnical phenomenon of the life in human society, and different nations and countries have different cultures. That is, culture is differentiated with national marks. The national character of culture decides that the language depends on culture as the background, namely, language will not exist without its culture。建筑，尤其是住宅建筑，與人類生活息息相關(guān)。 it is the parison on two languages to reveal the categories of culturefunctional semantics and ethnocultural semantics(. culturesynonymy and cultureantonym) and so on(Wu Guohua 17). Language is the product of the culture in the civil society. It shows people’s attitudes towards the world and their standards for activities. Language is a remarkable achievement of the civil human society and the sign of distinguished from the animals. Language depends on culture and is the reflection of culture. Words e out of the life style, living conventions, surroundings, social conditions of a nation. And this conducts the national characteristic of the word and the language. Architecture is the cultural product that most closely related with people’s living activities and also affects the national language and the semantics. 3. Architecture and culture Architecture is of the cultural product created in the human society. Its shapes, functions 淮陰師范學(xué)院 本科生畢業(yè)論文（設(shè)計(jì)） 4 and appearances are all catering for the certain culture pattern of the society. And residence takes the lead position in all kinds of buildings. Architecture as the culture product Architectures appear as a result of residence, one of the basic material needs of human beings for sheltering from wind and rain. Thus, architectures are considered to be one of the most important material needs for human living. “Material needs for living are the basic needs of great importance for man kind’s existence, and they are the base on which people carry out their activities. Judging from the quality of the materials, they are natural. While they are made use of in the society of human civilization, the materials are shaped as a result of catering for people’s tastes of different cultures. Thus, the substances from the natural world had been affected by various cultures and became containers full of cultural information ” (Liu 104). Said Liu in his book and he took the building as one of the examples for his parative study between Chinese and western cultures. Descriptions on how architectures received the cultural meanings were made that: “Houses in the ancient times were very simple without any decoration. With the development of the social technology, people began to add their designing thoughts and decorative things to the simple houses they built as their abilities of building and modeling were strengthened. As time went by, the houses gradually got on cultural information and became the embodiment of different cultures” (Liu 117). Resulted in the variation of people’s intention and activities, various kinds of architectures with different functions came into being, such as palaces, chur