Cultural Models in Language and Thought by Dorothy Holland

Cultural Models in Language and Thought by Dorothy Holland

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.

"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

Holland, Dorothy: - Dorothy Holland is Boshamer Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521311687
ISBN 10	0521311683
Title	Cultural Models in Language and Thought
Author	Dorothy Holland
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	1987-01-30
Number of pages	416
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable