Cultural models in language and thought / edited by Dorothy Holland, Naomi Quinn.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Holland, Dorothy C.

Quinn, Naomi.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language and culture.

Cognition and culture.

Physical Description:

xii, 400 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Summary:

The papers in this volume, a multidisciplinary collaboration of anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, explore the way 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 crucial importance of tacit, presupposed knowledge in the conduct of everyday life.

Many of the papers included examine American cultural knowledge; others, by anthropologists, provide accounts from very different cultures. Collectively, the authors argue that cultural knowledge is organized in "cultural models" - story-like chains of prototypical events that unfold in simplified worlds - and they 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 former allowing for knowledge to be mapped from known domains of the physical world onto conceptualizations in the social and psychological domains as well as in unknown physical-world domains; the latter providing different types of prototypical events out of which cultural models are constructed. The authors also reveal that some widely applicable cultural models recur nested within other, more special-purpose models, thereby lending cultures their thematicity. Finally, they show that shared models play a critical role in thinking, one that has gone largely unappreciated in recent cognitive science - that is, that of allowing humans to master, remember, and use the vast amount of knowledge required in everyday life.

This collection will appeal widely to anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, philosophers, students of artificial intelligence, and other readers interested in the processes of everyday human understanding.

Contents:

1. Culture and cognition / Naomi Quinn, Dorothy Holland 3

Part I. Presupposed worlds, language, and discourse

2. The definition of lie: an examination of the folk models underlying a semantic prototype / Eve E. Sweetser 43

3. Linguistic competence and folk theories of language: two English hedges / Paul Kay 67

4. Prestige and intimacy: the cultural models behind Americans' talk about gender types / Dorothy Holland, Debra Skinner 78

5. A folk model of the mind / Roy D'Andrade 112

Part II. Reasoning and problem solving from presupposed worlds

6. Proverbs and cultural models: an American psychology of problem solving / Geoffrey M. White 151

7. Convergent evidence for a cultural model of American marriage / Naomi Quinn 173

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, Zoltan Kovecses 195

9. Two theories of home heat control / Willett Kempton 222

10. How people construct mental models / Allan Collins, Dedre Gentner 243

Part IV. Negotiating social and psychological realities

11. Myth and experience in the Trobriand Islands / Edwin Hutchins 269

12. Goals, events, and understanding in Ifaluk emotion theory / Catherine Lutz 290

13. Ecuadorian illness stories: cultural knowledge in natural discourse / Laurie Price 313

14. Explanatory systems in oral life stories / Charlotte Linde 343

Part V. An appraisal

15. Models, "folk" and "cultural": paradigms regained? / Roger M. Keesing 369.

Notes:

Papers originally presented at a conference.

Includes bibliographies and index.

ISBN:

0521323460

0521311683

OCLC:

13860683