The document discusses how cultural encoding can impact the semantic meaning of signs for different discourse communities within the same language. It also changes over time within a single language. Words can represent culturally informed icons for the concepts and objects they signify. Different prosodic encodings form distinct ways of speaking that are typically associated with different languages. Onomatopoeia similarly links objects and sounds in culturally specific ways. The document emphasizes that the differences in codes between languages are also differences in the semantic meanings attributed to those codes by language-using communities, turning linguistic signs into cultural signs.