Acquiring the lexicon and grammar of universal kinship

Blythe, Joe; Tunmuck, Jeremiah; Mitchell, Alice; Rácz, Péter

doi:10.1353/lan.2020.0044

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 43 publications

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“…Kinship is also becoming increasingly central to economic historians, who have used kinship terminology structure to infer broader patterns of social structure [7,35]. With access to broader data, members of the Kinbank project have: demonstrated links between linguistic and social organization [36], and the regional variation in these relationships [29]; shown the modularity of Pama-Nyungan kinship terminology and quantified the connections between modules [37]; presented a collection of terms for languages whose kinship systems had never been fully described alongside new methods for Tupian and Cariban languages [38]; used corpus-based studies to show the difference in cultural evolutionary changes between kinship words and basic vocabulary [39]; used field studies to revive research on the acquisition of kinship language and concepts by children [40,41]; and performed multiple studies showing how kinship finds its way into core grammar [42,43].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology

Passmore,

Barth,

Greenhill

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures remains incompletely explained. Despite the wealth of kinship data in the anthropological record, comparative studies of kinship terminology are hindered by data accessibility. Here we present Kinbank, a new database of 210,903 kinterms from a global sample of 1,229 spoken languages. Using open-access and transparent data provenance, Kinbank offers an extensible resource for kinship terminology, enabling researchers to explore the rich diversity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns. We illustrate our contribution with two examples. We demonstrate strong gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms across 1,022 languages, and we show that there is no evidence for a coevolutionary relationship between cross-cousin marriage and bifurcate-merging terminology in Bantu languages. Analysing kinship data is notoriously challenging; Kinbank aims to eliminate data accessibility issues from that challenge and provide a platform to build an interdisciplinary understanding of kinship.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology

Passmore,

Barth,

Greenhill

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

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The epistemics of social relations in Murrinhpatha, Garrwa and Jaru conversations

Blythe

Mushin

Stirling

et al. 2022

Journal of Pragmatics

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Kin Cognition and Communication: What Talking, Gesturing, and Drawing About Family Can Tell us About the Way We Think About This Core Social Structure

Devylder,

Hinnell,

van de Weier

et al. 2024

Cognitive Science

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When people talk about kinship systems, they often use co‐speech gestures and other representations to elaborate. This paper investigates such polysemiotic (spoken, gestured, and drawn) descriptions of kinship relations, to see if they display recurring patterns of conventionalization that capture specific social structures. We present an exploratory hypothesis‐generating study of descriptions produced by a lesser‐known ethnolinguistic community to the cognitive sciences: the Paamese people of Vanuatu. Forty Paamese speakers were asked to talk about their family in semi‐guided kinship interviews. Analyses of the speech, gesture, and drawings produced during these interviews revealed that lineality (i.e., mother's side vs. father's side) is lateralized in the speaker's gesture space. In other words, kinship members of the speaker's matriline are placed on the left side of the speaker's body and those of the patriline are placed on their right side, when they are mentioned in speech. Moreover, we find that the gesture produced by Paamese participants during verbal descriptions of marital relations are performed significantly more often on two diagonal directions of the sagittal axis. We show that these diagonals are also found in the few diagrams that participants drew on the ground to augment their verbo‐gestural descriptions of marriage practices with drawing. We interpret this behavior as evidence of a spatial template, which Paamese speakers activate to think and communicate about family relations. We therefore argue that extending investigations of kinship structures beyond kinship terminologies alone can unveil additional key factors that shape kinship cognition and communication and hereby provide further insights into the diversity of social structures.

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Acquiring the lexicon and grammar of universal kinship

Cited by 3 publications

References 43 publications

Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology

Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology

The epistemics of social relations in Murrinhpatha, Garrwa and Jaru conversations

Kin Cognition and Communication: What Talking, Gesturing, and Drawing About Family Can Tell us About the Way We Think About This Core Social Structure

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