Situating Cultural Models in History and Cognition

Abstract

Cultural cognitive models (CCMs) will be examined and described from their earliest characterization a quarter of a century ago to accounts provided within the past few years, to provide historical context. Although there is not a standardized procedure for describing cultural models, agreement exists, at least tacitly, as to what the models are and how they are to be elicited and described (Blount, 2011; Quinn, 2011). Theory and methods, however, need to be assessed in light of recent developments in cultural theory, lexical representation, and neuroscience. The idea is to situate CCMs within broader contexts in order to better integrate them with related developments in other fields of inquiry. The aim is to produce a more integrated, synthesized perspective, as can be found in other areas of language and cognition (Feldman, 2006; Geeraerts, 2010; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1993; Langacker, 1987, 1990, 2001, 2008; and Taylor, 1989, 2002, 2012). Cognitive models developed by those scholars, like CCMs, also have schematic grounding, and they are culturally elaborated and interactionally negotiated (Hougaard, 2005). Among cognitive models given attention in this chapter, Taylor’s contributions on the mental corpus are particularly useful, and will therefore be discussed in some detail within an expanded view of CCMs.