There four fundamental relational models: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. Each of them utilizes a distinct conformation system to represent, communicate, coordinate, motivate, and evaluate social relationships of that kind. The conformation systems are indexical equivalence of bodies, iconic dimensions of rank, concrete operations of one-to-one matching, and purely conventional symbolism of proportions. The chapter also introduces complementarity theory, which posits innate structures that can function only in conjunction with cultural complements. It concludes by saying that the book is intended to be an antitheses to symbolic anthropology.

Chapter 6 analyzes word association responses, categorizes them into meaning-based and syntagmatic and compares to the patterns of corresponding usage corpora. It shows that words eliciting meaning-based responses tend to be independent in usage while words eliciting syntagmatic responses tend to participate in multi-word units, suggesting that word associations can indeed say something about the processes at work in language use. A deeper analysis of syntagmatic associations and their comparison to usage patterns suggest the psycholinguistic reality of the model of a unit of meaning and in particular of abstracted associations: those of colligation and semantic preference. The chapter also discusses the core meaning effect, the influence of directionality and contiguity on the strength of association, the relationship of syntagmatic association to the boundaries of a unit of meaning as well as the evidence of the processes of fixing and approximation observed in Chapter 5.