Componential Analysis of Kinship Terminology ― A Computational Perspective

This book presents the first computer program, called KINSHIP, automating the task of componential analysis of kinship vocabularies. KINSHIP accepts as input the kin terms of a language with their attendant kin types and can produce all alternative componential models of a kinship system, including the most parsimonious one, using the minimum number of dimensions and components in a kin term definition. A further simplicity constraint ensures the coordination between kin term definitions. Inspecting previous practices of the method of componential analysis reveals two basic problems in published models: (1) the commonly occurring inconsistency of componential models (violating necessity or sufficiency conditions of kin term definitions), (2) the huge number of alternative componential models. The application of KINSHIP with its simplicity constraints successfully solves both these problems. The utility of the program is illustrated on complete data sets from more than a dozen languages from Indo-European and non-Indo-European origin.

Vladimir Pericliev is a Professor at the Institute for Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria. His research interests include general linguistics, computational linguistics and Artificial Intelligence (specifically, machine scientific discovery). He has written three monographs and over 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals.