The conceptual building blocks of kinship terminologies

Abstract

Kinship terminology was once a major focus of structural linguistics, yet the arcane symbols and notations of structural linguistics cannot plausibly represent the cognitive realities of speakers, and therefore hold little appeal for today’s cognitive linguists. This study seeks to put kinship semantics back on the cognitive linguistics agenda. It demonstrates that the emic-conceptual meanings of kinship terms can be successfully modelled using ordinary language words which make sense to the people concerned; and, furthermore, that this approach supports systematic cross-linguistic comparison. The study represents a re-boot of Wierzbicka’s “ordinary-language model” of kinship terminologies, retaining birth and conception as prototypes while shifting the model into the realm of the social. Revised explications of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ take account of adoption and similar practices. Original explications are proposed for ‘wife’ and ‘husband’. While acknowledging cultural elaborations, it is argued that these four concepts (‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘husband’, ‘wife’) may be substantially shared among the world’s linguacultures. With these basic conceptual building blocks in hand, it is demonstrated, using examples from English, Chinese, and Pitjantjatjara, that diverse language-specific kinship concepts can be built up in a systematic fashion. The study overviews a distinctive cognitive linguistic approach to the conceptual semantics of kin terms.