Kinship and Social Cognition in Australian Languages: Kayardild and Pitjantjatjara

Abstract

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 (in dialogue with earlier analyses by Nicholas Evans and Harold Scheffler).

Keywords:

• Kinship Terminologies
• Australian Languages
• NSM Semantics
• Anglocentrism
• Eurocentrism
• Social Cognition
• Semantic Typology

Notes

¹ In his account of the Pirahã rules against incest, Everett (2012a) asserts that they can be stated in English but not in Pirahã itself. To me, this looks like an unjustifiably Anglocentric conclusion, given that these rules can be stated without reliance on English-specific concepts, as shown here. For further discussion, see Wierzbicka (2013).

² In his 1985 Kayardild, and in the 2010 ‘Semantic typology’ article, Evans uses the forms kularind, duujind and wakath (without final a).