The field of kinship is broad. It concerns the representations and practices, explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious, which are concerned with the genetic links that exist between individuals. Culture and history lead to wide variation in this field, thus genetic links may be represented saliently or not at all. They may have great significance for what people do or only little. Kinship representations may be represented as a bounded set, or be inextricably mixed with representations which have nothing to do with genetic links or allusions to these. These representations may involve speech acts or not. When they do, we find among such speech acts what have been called “kinship terminologies.” The sociologically most important type of kinship terminologies are terms of address such as “Dad” and “Auntie.” These terms of address do not form a closed system and cannot be understood unless taken together with other forms of address such as pronouns, names and other linguistic and pragmatic phenomena. For example, in English, parents do not normally use a kinship term of address but first names when talking to their children. Then, there is another group of terms: the so-called descriptive terms. These occur when one wants to specify a relationship. In a natural setting, the use of such terms is less frequent than it is for terms of address, and it is the descriptive terms which are the subject matter of this paper. My first point is, therefore, that the title of the paper misleads as to the scope of argument since it purports to be “human kinship” in general.
Descriptive kinship terms form a bounded set; but this fact is mere tautology because of the meaning of the English word “kinship.” Whether descriptive kinship terms form a cognitive bounded set must remain an open issue and Jones supplies no evidence that they do.
Words that can be called descriptive kinship form a variety of different formal systems. There have been a number of proposals for analysing such systems and these are well reviewed here. The proposal to use Optimality Theory for such an analysis is convincing. The question, however, is: What is the significance of this? Jones claims to, at the very least, make a contribution to the study of the conceptual structure of descriptive kinship terminology. I am not quite sure what is meant by this claim. Does it mean that speakers somehow go through the rule procedures implied by Optimality Theory when deciding which word to use? If that is the claim, then I regret that Jones presents little or no evidence for such mental procedures. The author also claims that the rule procedure for Optimality Theory explains how the child learns the proper use of descriptive kinship term. Again this may be so; but he cites no developmental study of the learning of kinship terms.
The main conclusion of the article is “that constraints are neither innate nor culturally acquired, but discovered.” This may be so; but I would have thought that none of the three possibilities exclude each other and probably all three are true. Even, in any case, if the paper has demonstrated this, this demonstration would then apply to all those apparently systematic bits of our vocabulary (closed class forms) and the conclusion would be in no way specific to kinship. The article thus does not advance our understanding of the conceptualisation of kinship as such.
The field of kinship is broad. It concerns the representations and practices, explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious, which are concerned with the genetic links that exist between individuals. Culture and history lead to wide variation in this field, thus genetic links may be represented saliently or not at all. They may have great significance for what people do or only little. Kinship representations may be represented as a bounded set, or be inextricably mixed with representations which have nothing to do with genetic links or allusions to these. These representations may involve speech acts or not. When they do, we find among such speech acts what have been called “kinship terminologies.” The sociologically most important type of kinship terminologies are terms of address such as “Dad” and “Auntie.” These terms of address do not form a closed system and cannot be understood unless taken together with other forms of address such as pronouns, names and other linguistic and pragmatic phenomena. For example, in English, parents do not normally use a kinship term of address but first names when talking to their children. Then, there is another group of terms: the so-called descriptive terms. These occur when one wants to specify a relationship. In a natural setting, the use of such terms is less frequent than it is for terms of address, and it is the descriptive terms which are the subject matter of this paper. My first point is, therefore, that the title of the paper misleads as to the scope of argument since it purports to be “human kinship” in general.
Descriptive kinship terms form a bounded set; but this fact is mere tautology because of the meaning of the English word “kinship.” Whether descriptive kinship terms form a cognitive bounded set must remain an open issue and Jones supplies no evidence that they do.
Words that can be called descriptive kinship form a variety of different formal systems. There have been a number of proposals for analysing such systems and these are well reviewed here. The proposal to use Optimality Theory for such an analysis is convincing. The question, however, is: What is the significance of this? Jones claims to, at the very least, make a contribution to the study of the conceptual structure of descriptive kinship terminology. I am not quite sure what is meant by this claim. Does it mean that speakers somehow go through the rule procedures implied by Optimality Theory when deciding which word to use? If that is the claim, then I regret that Jones presents little or no evidence for such mental procedures. The author also claims that the rule procedure for Optimality Theory explains how the child learns the proper use of descriptive kinship term. Again this may be so; but he cites no developmental study of the learning of kinship terms.
The main conclusion of the article is “that constraints are neither innate nor culturally acquired, but discovered.” This may be so; but I would have thought that none of the three possibilities exclude each other and probably all three are true. Even, in any case, if the paper has demonstrated this, this demonstration would then apply to all those apparently systematic bits of our vocabulary (closed class forms) and the conclusion would be in no way specific to kinship. The article thus does not advance our understanding of the conceptualisation of kinship as such.