ABSTRACT
Having defined ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘parent’, we are well placed to define the rest of English ‘kinship terminology’, i.e. all the lexemes used for referring to one’s ‘blood’ relatives. The table contains a complete list (ignoring synonyms like AUNTIE and MUM, and also the open-ended possibilities allowed by adding GREAT-before GRAND-):
We shall see in this unit that it is possible to define the senses of all these lexemes in terms of other senses which ultimately rest on ‘mother’ and ‘father’, plus ‘sex’.
