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.

Introduction; 1. Culture and cognition Naomi Quinn, and Dorothy Holland; Part I. Presupposed Worlds, Language, and Discourse: 2. The definiton of lie: an examination of the folk models underlying a semantic prototype Eve E. Sweetser; 3. Linguistic competence and folk theories of language: two English hedges Paul Kay; 4. Prestige and intimacy: the cultural models behind Americans' talk about gender types Dorothy Holland, and Debra Skinner; 5. A folk model of the mind Roy D'Andrade; Part II. Reasoning and Problem Solving from Presupposed Worlds: 6. Proverbs and cultural models: an American psychology of problem solving Geoffrey M. White; 7. Convergent evidence for a cultural model of American marriage Naomi Quinn; 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 and Zoltán Kövecses; 9. Two theories of home heat control Willett Kempton; 10. How people construct mental models Allan Collins and Dedre Gentner; Part IV. Negotiating Social and Psychological Realities: 11. Myth and experience in the Trobriand Islands Edwin Hutchins; 12. Goals, events, and understanding in Ifaluk emotion theory Catherine Lutz; 13. Ecuadorian illness stories: cultural knowledge in natural discourse Laurie Price; 14. Explanatory systems in oral life stories Charlotte Linde; Part V. An Appraisal: 15. Models, 'folk' and 'cultural': paradigms regained? Roger M. Keesing.