Particularistic or Universalistic Analyses of Fanti Kin-Terminology: The Alternative Goals of Terminological Analysis

Language in the Constitution of Kinship

“…Pronominal prefix is obligatory shimá 'my mother' Navajo nimá 'your mother' bimá 'his or her mother' (Young and Morgan 1980) Pronominal prefix is not obligatory tiwéÂye 'wife's brother' Nez Perce ºintiwéÂye 'my wife's brother' (Aoki 1966:357) Pronominal prefix with modification of the stem áataál 'my father's father' Telefol kaalábáal 'your father's father' aalábáal 'his father's father' (Healey 1962:15) (b) Other prefix nana n'na 'grandmother's mother' (Kronenfeld 1980) Fanti (c) Pronominal suffix kirda¤na Warlpiri father-1SG 'my father' (Laughren 1982:74) (d) Clitic possessive pronouns alternating with free pronouns mamachemi 'my father' Georgian dedasheni 'your (sg.) mother' chemi da 'my sister' (Dahl and Koptjevskaya-Tamm 2001:209) DEPENDENT MARKING (e) Grammatical case ngumban¤da wakatha maku kiyarrng¤k Kayardild 2SG.POSS-NOM sister.NOM sister.in.law.NOM two-NOM 'Your sister has two sisters-in-law.'…”

“…These can be expressed as simple equivalence statements such as one's mother's or father's sister is one's aunt (Russell 1950;Wallace 1960Wallace , 1965Burling 1965Burling , 1970Kronenfeld 1980;Keen 1985;Read 2007). The key semantic operation here is substitution of a more concise expression such as grandmother for a longer one-parent's mother or mother's or father's mother.…”

“…In English, mom or mommy (also mum or mummy in British English) is often preferred as a mode of address, while mother may be chosen where a more formal register is appropriate. Relative-product definitions generate choices, such as between unskewed and skewed terms (Kronenfeld 1980;Rumsey 1981;McConvell and Alpher 2002). 6 In the case of dense kinship networks, people are often faced with choices about what kind of relative a particular person should count as, because the relationship can be traced through different links, or because of anomalous marriages in prescriptive marriage systems such as the Gooniyandi one (McGregor 2012:167).…”

“…The specification of relativeproduct definitions of kin terms has been taken as an alternative to varieties of formal analysis of kinship terminologies (e.g., Burling 1963:73;Kronenfeld 1980), but in reality they are very different kinds of thing. Componential analysis accounts for focal meanings of kin terms in terms of semantic features such as LINEAL, COLLATERAL, and GENERATION as well as gender (Casson 1973;Romney and D'Andrade 1964;Lounsbury 1964;Scheffler and Lounsbury 1971).…”

Formal analysis of kinship terminologies and its relationship to what constitutes kinship

“…Kronenfeld, 1980) of expressing the It is a way of directly linking kin terms to one another as symbols without first providing an instantiation of the symbols (e.g. via kin types) and without secondly using the instantiated form as the way to determine how one symbol is related to another symbol.…”