book notice: Culture, Society, and Cognition: Kronenfeld

[Harold Schiffman]

Culture, Society, and Cognition: Kronenfeld

Series Title: Mouton Series in Pragmatics 3
Published: 2008
Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter
                http://www.mouton-publishers.com

Book URL: http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/sp/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110206074-1

Author: David B. Kronenfeld

Abstract:

This theoretically motivated approach to pragmatics (vs. semantics)
produces a radically new view of culture and its role vis-a-vis society.
Understanding what words mean in use requires an open-ended recourse to
pragmatic cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge makes up a productive
conceptual system. Members of a cultural community share the system but
not all of the system's content, making culture a system of parallel
distributed cognition. This book presents such a system, and then
elaborates a version of "cultural models" that relates actions to goals,
values, emotional content, and context, and that allows both systematic
generative capacity and systematic variation across cultural and
subcultural groups. Such models are offered as the basic units of cultural
action. Culture thus conceived is shown as a tool that people use rather
than as something deeply internalized in their psyches.

http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-3277.html
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