ABSTRACT
Some early rhetoricians argued that the things in the world and the words that refer to them are mediated by concepts in the mind that underlie them. Anthropologists rediscovered that culture was not only encoded in language; it was encoded very much like language. Optimism was high, and two special issues of the American Anthropologist offered legitimacy to what came to be called cognitive anthropology. Important edited volumes saw cognitive anthropology being fruitfully applied to the study of kinship systems, as well as to a number of special domains such as disease terminologies, categories of beer in Germany, and spatial concepts of the homeless. Traditionally, those who begin a study of semantics - the branch of linguistics devoted to meaning - will begin by noticing a distinction between denotation and connotation. When people speak they are not just playing a chess game, manipulating abstract symbols that have importance only in that they contrast with each other.
