The Extensionist Hypothesis and Marking Rules in the Formal Analysis of Kinship Terminology

A number of kinds of formal analysis of kinship terminology have appeared in the anthropological literature. This paper supports the validity of extension rule analysis as an approach to this domain. Data are presented from a kin term system that includes culturally appropriate variability to show that, via semantic marking rules, the frequency with which informants associate kin types with particular kin terms parallels the order in which an extensionist analysis of those terms would merge those kin types into a kernal, or focal, kin type for each term

Epistemology · Fictive kinship · Genealogy · Information retrieval · Kinship · Linguistics · Merge (version control) · Next of kin · Parallels · Sociology · Term (time) · Terminology · Anthropology · Computer Science · History · Language and cultural evolution · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Semantic Web and Ontologies