The study of the relationship between language and thought, and how this apparently differs between cultures and social groups, is a rapidly expanding area of inquiry. In this book Giovanni Bennardo discusses the relationship between language and the mental organization of knowledge, based on the results of a fi eldwork project carried out in the Kingdom of Tonga in Polynesia. It challenges some existing assumptions in linguistics, cognitive anthropology and cognitive science and proposes a new foundational cultural model, ‘radiality’, to show how space, time, and social relationships are expressed both linguistically and cognitively. A foundational cultural model is knowledge that is repeated in several domains and shared within a culturally homogeneous group. These knowledge structures are lenses through which we interpret the world and guide our behavior