Kinship and Lexical Typology

Course author

Nicolas Evans

Distinguished Professor, Australian National University

 

Materials

Kinship and Lexical Typology - materials.rar

Kinship and Lexical Typology - presentation 

Course title and content

I have decided to focus the course on the topic 'Lexical typology of kinship'. This is of course just a subset of the advertised title 'Lexical typology: an anthropological view' but I believe this will allow a more intense and focussed examination of a fascinating area.

Course annotation 

Kinship terms are centrally interesting to lexical typology from many perspectives: all languages have them, but the meanings they denote are structured according to hundreds of different systems.

Kinship vocabulary is arguably the most structured of all lexical domains, in the sense of allowing a small number of features to combine in many ways to generate hundreds of terms. In most, possibly all, languages systems of kinship terminology have recursive principles of extension or formation that can extend their use outwards without bound, either through stacking of modifiers (great-great-grandchild; ninth cousin etc.) or recursive application of equivalence rules (in many Australian languages the rules of same-sex sibling equivalence [FB father’s brother = F father] combine with other rules of deduction [FS = B, father’s son = brother] to treat some types of cousins as siblings, whatever their degree of remove: FFFBSSS=FFFSSS=FFBSS=FFSS=FBS=FS=B.

These features make kinship systems ideal for studying synchronic patterns of colexification, and systematic study of cross-linguistic kin term organisation goes back to Morgan’s massive investigations in the nineteenth century. Many social factors produce extensions or contractions of kinship meanings, ranging from the impact of different marriage or clan structures on kinship systems, to the effects arising from the extended use of kin terms as address terms; this makes kinship systems an excellent place to study patterns of diachronic change and of individual variation.

Two final issues we will examine are (a) the word-class status of kinship terms, and (b) ‘kintax’, the coding of kinship-relevant contrasts in grammar. (a) kinship terms exhibit extremely variable combinatoric behaviour cross-linguistically, reflecting the tension between the fact that kinship relations are states, that kin terms denote individuals (like nouns), and set up two-place relations (like transitive verbs). (b) A number of languages of the world, particularly in Australia and adjoining regions, promote kinship-sensitive categories to grammatical status, including kinship-based pronouns and dyadic kinship terms.

While the course will be topic-based, roughly following the topics above, along the way participants will be introduced to a number of analytic techniques, including componential analysis, methods for systematising the study of colexification (/syncretism), phylogenetic methods for reconstructing changes in system, and naturalistic field methods for studying variationist semantics as it applies to kinship.