UC Riverside

Kinship terms--like words in other domains--are part of the general semantic system of contrastive sense and reference while encoding pragmatic conceptualizations of a particular substantive domain. A good classification of types of terminology takes account of intrinsic structure in the categorized world--for words, both semantic and pragmatic structure--while enabling clean and effective analytic statements relating to given theoretical goals. For data universes which are fairly well understood and which have received theoretical attention, revised and improved data categorizations may offer a powerful and effective means for the refinement of theory.