Unusual Categories Can Be Stable

I reconstruct the kinship terminology of Proto-Sogeram, the ancestor to ten languages of Papua New Guinea, and describe how it has changed in the history of the family. Two patterns are of theoretical interest. One is a recurrent pattern of equating elder siblings with parents, manifested in equations between grandparents and aunts and uncles, and between siblings-in-law and parents. The second is an equation between consanguineal and affinal siblings that I term in-law mirroring. In both cases polysemy and referential overlap among kin terms are diachronically stable, even when they are typologically unusual. The Sogeram data also demonstrates the importance of a focus on individual lexemes in reconstructing kinship terminologies

Ancestor · Focus (optics) · Genealogy · Grandparent · Kinship · Linguistics · Mirroring · Polysemy · Sociology · Anthropology · Communication · History · Language and cultural evolution · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation