The Meaning of Kinship Terms 1

Abstract

This chapter seeks to portray the meanings of some basic kin terms in English and some other European languages in a new way, holding on to two principles: that all the meanings one posits have to be open to intuitive verification by ordinary native speakers, and that the meanings posited for individual kin words should ‘add up’ to a coherent overall picture. To achieve this, the chapter aims at an account which could make sense in a developmental as well as cross-linguistic perspective: there must be some imaginable developmental progression from the meanings of children’s kin words such as mummy and daddy to the meanings of kin terms hypothesized as operating in adult speech. The chapter shows that semantic components phrased in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) allow us to ‘reconstruct’ such a progression in a way which is both rigorous and testable and which makes sense to ordinary speakers, including language learners.