Cultural Models in Language and Thought / Edition 1

by Dorothy Holland, Naomi Quinn

Overview

The papers in this volume, a multidisciplinary collaboration of anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, explore the ways in which cultural knowledge is organized and used in everyday language and understanding. Employing a variety of methods, which rely heavily on linguistic data, the authors offer analyses of domains of knowledge ranging across the physical, social, and psychological worlds, and reveal the importance of tacit, presupposed knowledge in the conduct of everyday life. The authors argue that cultural knowledge is organized in 'cultural models' - storylike chains of prototypical events that unfold in simplified worlds - and explore the nature and role of these models. They demonstrate that cultural knowledge may take either proposition-schematic or image-schematic form, each enabling the performance of different kinds of cognitive tasks. Metaphor and metonymy are shown to have special roles in the construction of cultural models. The authors also demonstrates that some widely applicable cultural models recur nested within other, more special-purpose models. Finally, it is shown that shared models play a critical role in thinking, allowing humans to master, remember, and use the vast amount of knowledge required in everyday life. This innovative collection will appeal to anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, philosophers, students of artificial intelligence, and other readers interested in the processes of everyday human understanding.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521311687
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/30/1987
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.94(w) x 8.98(h) x 1.10(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Culture and cognition Naomi Quinn, and Dorothy Holland; Part I. Presupposed Worlds, Language, and Discourse: 2. The definiton of lie: an examination of the folk models underlying a semantic prototype Eve E. Sweetser; 3. Linguistic competence and folk theories of language: two English hedges Paul Kay; 4. Prestige and intimacy: the cultural models behind Americans' talk about gender types Dorothy Holland, and Debra Skinner; 5. A folk model of the mind Roy D'Andrade; Part II. Reasoning and Problem Solving from Presupposed Worlds: 6. Proverbs and cultural models: an American psychology of problem solving Geoffrey M. White; 7. Convergent evidence for a cultural model of American marriage Naomi Quinn; Part III. The Role of Metaphor and Analogy in Representing Knowledge of Presupposed Worlds: 8. The cognitive model of anger inherent in American English George Lakoff and Zoltán Kövecses; 9. Two theories of home heat control Willett Kempton; 10. How people construct mental models Allan Collins and Dedre Gentner; Part IV. Negotiating Social and Psychological Realities: 11. Myth and experience in the Trobriand Islands Edwin Hutchins; 12. Goals, events, and understanding in Ifaluk emotion theory Catherine Lutz; 13. Ecuadorian illness stories: cultural knowledge in natural discourse Laurie Price; 14. Explanatory systems in oral life stories Charlotte Linde; Part V. An Appraisal: 15. Models, 'folk' and 'cultural': paradigms regained? Roger M. Keesing.

Editorial Reviews

"This book, emphasizing as it does the role of the cultural component in human knowledge, should be of interest to students of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology, as well as to specialists in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science." Studies in Second Language Learning

From the Publisher