SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This work presents a critical examination of the methodology of the analysis of kinship terms over the last 100 years, gives a global evaluation of the 'state of the art', and proposes a new, deictic interpretation of kinship terminology. The methodological survey is divided into three sections devoted to: the historical approach (section 2), which explains kinship terminology in terms of historical causes; the structural/functional approach (section 3) which relates it to present structures or functions; and the formal approach (section 4), which concentrates on the Internal structure of sets of kinship terms. For the first two of these sections a number of representative authors are chosen and their views on kinship terminology are examined. The formal approach and the discussions connected with it are presented in the form of a survey of the study of English kinship terminology. The global evaluation (section 5) assesses the major issues arising from each of these approaches. In conclusion a new proposal is formulated for approaching kinship terminology as a deictic system. In a final section (section 6) this proposal is elaborated theoretically, and applied concretely to Dutch kinship terms.