De Gruyter Mouton Culture, Society, and Cognition - De Gruyter Mouton Series

Explore a new way of understanding the relationship between culture and society through this theoretically motivated approach to pragmatics. Moving beyond simple semantics, this work examines how understanding language in use requires an open-ended recourse to pragmatic cultural knowledge. This book presents culture as a productive conceptual system. It explains how members of a cultural community share this system without possessing all of its content, a concept described as parallel distributed cognition. By examining how cultural knowledge functions, the text provides a framework for understanding how human communication and thought are connected. Readers will find a detailed elaboration of cultural models that connect human actions to specific goals, values, and emotional content. This volume is an essential resource for those studying how knowledge, values, and social actions form a cohesive system within various communities.