Abstract
The cultural connotation is the basic lingua-cultural concept. It links two semiotic
systems – language and culture as the forms of consciousness. It is the means of storage
and of the transmission of culture into the language. The cultural connotation serves as
an indicator of the figuratively motivated nominative units in which cultural
information is localized in the associative-shaped base and is regulated by the
motivating role of inner form. The cultural connotation is not only a bridge between
language and cultural signs/categories, but also a tool to study them (in particular,
metaphors and phraseological units). The knowledge of cultural connotations as the
operating system is the necessary in the process of interpreting linguistic signs as elements
of the signs of culture, and in the process of formation of the linguistic and
cultural competence. The skill of understanding the cultural information, coded in
a connotative way, determines the proficiency in a foreign language.