Wierzbicka, Anna (1975). *For the umpteenth time – kinship. Language Sciences, 34, 1-4.
(1987) Kinship
Wierzbicka, Anna (1987). Kinship semantics: Lexical universals as a key to psychological reality. Anthropological Linguistics, 29(2), 131-156.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/30027968
Abstract:
Is it possible to discover the psychologically real meaning of kinship terms? Some maintain that it is not, because of the non-uniqueness of possible semantic analyses. Others argue that any search for psychological reality is threatened by an almost unavoidable ethnocentrism, resulting from the use of ‘ethnographer’s English’, or any language other than that of the informants. The present paper argues that both these problems can be overcome if semantic analysis is carried out in terms of lexical universals.
More information:
A more recent publication building on this one is:
Chapter 9 (pp. 329-354) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1992), Semantics, culture, and cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2013) Australian Aboriginal languages – Kinship obligations
Wierzbicka, Anna (2013). Translatability and the scripting of other peoples’ souls. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 24(1), 1-22. DOI: 10.1111/taja.12018
If anthropology aims at understanding ‘others’, then obviously anthropologists must be interested in the meaning of what those ‘others’ say. But to understand what speakers of a language other than our own say, we need to know what exactly the words and grammatical categories of that other language mean. This article argues that translating indigenous categories into academic English does not allow us to capture indigenous perspectives and leads to what Geertz calls “scripting other people’s souls”. Focusing on cognitive and cultural categories from Australian Aboriginal languages usually linked with English labels such as ‘kinship obligations’ and ‘odd-numbered generations’, the article shows how the ways of thinking encoded in these languages can be explicated from the insider’s point of view, in simple words and simple sentences directly cross-translatable into the indigenous languages themselves.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2013) Kayardild, Pitjantjatjara – Kinship terms
Wierzbicka, Anna (2013). Kinship and social cognition in Australian languages: Kayardild and Pitjantjatjara. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3), 302-321. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2013.846458
While many anthropologists these days dismiss the study of kinship terminologies as something that belongs – or should belong – to the past, from an Australian perspective kin terms must still be seen as an essential guide to the ways in which speakers of many languages understand their social world. This being so, establishing what these terms really mean – from an insider’s, rather than an anthropologist’s or linguist’s point of view – remains an essential task. This paper argues that while this task cannot be accomplished with traditional methods of linguistic anthropology, it can be with the techniques of NSM semantics. The paper shows how this can be done by re-analysing
some basic kin terms in Kayardild and in Pitjantjatjara.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2015) Semantic molecules – Kinship
Wierzbicka, Anna (2015). New perspectives on kinship: Overcoming the Eurocentrism and scientism of kinship studies through lexical universals. In Nancy Bonvillain (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic anthropology (pp. 62-79). New York: Routledge.
Given a measure of mental discipline, effort and experience, unfamiliar concepts embodied in kinship terminologies can be explained to outsiders through ordinary language. To grasp them, one does not require a tutorial in kinship studies or in arcane formalisms of any kind. One does need, however, an explanation. If this explanation is free of any technical terminology, if it is couched in words that one can understand, and if one is prepared to make an effort to get out of one’s accustomed ways of thinking, then with the help of such an explanation, authentic understanding can be reached.
See also:
Kotorova, Elizaveta (2018). Analysis of kinship terms using Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Anna Wierzbicka’s approach. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22(3), 701-710.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2016) Chinese (Cantonese, Teochew) – ‘Uncle’-type kinship terms
Xue, Wendi (2016). The semantics of ‘uncle’-type kinship terms in Cantonese (Guangzhou) and Teochew (Jieyang). Master’s thesis, Australian National University.
Kinship stands as the foundation of all human societies, and kinship terms have been an important area of research in cultural anthropology and linguistics. Although scholars have accumulated much information on kinship terminology across many languages, there is still a gap to be bridged regarding the Sinitic languages, especially the non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese; moreover, many previous studies require semantic reanalysis so that the native speaker’s point of view can be revealed. This thesis examines the under-surveyed groups of kinship terms which are semantically related to the English category of ‘uncle’ (henceforth ‘uncle’-type) in Cantonese and Teochew, and uses the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) for their semantic analysis. It offers full NSM explications for the 32 ‘uncle-type’ terms in the two languages under three major categories: father’s side, mother’s side and in-laws; it also explains how these explications are arrived at and discusses the similarities and differences in the semantic patterns between these two non-Mandarin Chinese varieties. An innovative aspect of the thesis is that it proposes four culture-specific semantic molecules in explications. As well as shedding light on the under-explored area of ‘uncle’-type kinship terminology in Sinitic languages, this work highlights the diversity within Han Chinese culture, which has often been misunderstood as a homogeneous system based on the prevailing Mandarin-centric conventions.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2016) Semantic molecules – Kinship
Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). Back to ‘mother’ and ‘father’: Overcoming the eurocentrism of kinship studies through eight lexical universals. Current Anthropology, 57(4), 408-429. DOI: 10.1086/687360
This paper addresses one of the most controversial issues in cultural anthropology: the conceptual foundations of kinship and the apparent inevitability of ethnocentrism in kinship studies. The field of kinship studies has been in turmoil over the past few decades, repeatedly pronounced dead and then again rising from the ashes and being declared central to human affairs. As this paper argues, the conceptual confusion surrounding kinship is to a large extent due to the lack of a clear and rigorous methodology for discovering how speakers of the world’s different languages actually navigate their kinship systems.
Building on the author’s earlier work on kinship but taking the analysis much further, this paper seeks to demonstrate that such a methodology can be found in Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory (developed by the author and colleagues), which relies on 65 universal semantic primes and on a small number of universal “semantic molecules” including ‘mother’ and ‘father’. The paper offers a new model for the interpretation of kinship terminologies and opens new perspectives for the investigation of kinship systems across languages and cultures.
Comments by a number of scholars, including Felix Ameka, follow the paper.
See also:
Kotorova, Elizaveta (2018). Analysis of kinship terms using Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Anna Wierzbicka’s approach. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22(3), 701-710.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2017) Kinship
Wierzbicka, Anna (2017). The meaning of kinship terms: A developmental and cross-linguistic perspective. In Zhengdao Ye (Ed.), The semantics of nouns (pp. 19-62). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198736721.003.0002
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 that 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 that is both rigorous and testable and that makes sense to ordinary speakers, including language learners.
See also:
Kotorova, Elizaveta (2018). Analysis of kinship terms using Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Anna Wierzbicka’s approach. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22(3), 701-710.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2018) Kinship
Kotorova, Elizaveta (2018). Analysis of kinship terms using Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Anna Wierzbicka’s approach. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22(3), 701-710. DOI: 10.22363/2312-9182-2018-22-3-701-710. PDF (open access)
Written in Russian.
This paper provides a brief overview of some publications by Anna Wierzbicka devoted to the study of kinship terms in different languages and cultures. The paper considers the approach of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), proposed by Wierzbicka for describing the semantics of kinship terms based on the use of lexical universals and shows the advantages of this approach in comparison with other methods of analysis. It demonstrates advantages of this method over other methods of semantic analysis, including overcoming eurocentrism tendencies in the analysis of kinship terms.
The paper contains Russian versions of some of the explications proposed in:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). New perspectives on kinship: Overcoming the Eurocentrism and scientism of kinship studies through lexical universals. In Nancy Bonvillain (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic anthropology (pp. 62-79). New York: Routledge.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). Back to ‘mother’ and ‘father’: Overcoming the eurocentrism of kinship studies through eight lexical universals. Current Anthropology, 57(4), 408-429.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2017). The meaning of kinship terms: A developmental and cross-linguistic perspective. In Zhengdao Ye (Ed.), The semantics of nouns (pp. 19-62). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
