American Kinship Terms Once More

Abstract

The several formal analyses that have been made of American kinship terminology have 1) failed to account for the variable usage of either children or adults, 2) failed to capitalize upon the natural colloquial ability of all speakers to provide verbal definitions of some terms, and 3) been rather overburdened with abstruse symbolic notation. By approaching terminological usage as a system built by means of a sequence of principles (a sequence that seems to correspond to the manner in which children learn to use their terms) and by capitalizing upon verbal definitions, it is possible to offer an analysis which also suggests that some aspects of our terminology are more central and uniform, while other aspects are more variable and peripheral. Such an analysis appears somewhat banal when compared to other more elaborate and symbolically sophisticated analyses, but its very banality suggests that it may be closer to the cognitive structure of speakers of American English.