The universal psychology of kinship: evidence from language

Kinship is central to social organization in many societies; how people think about kinship should be relevant to social cognition generally. One window onto the mental representation of kinship is afforded by variation and universals in terms for kin. Kin terminologies are commonly organized around binary distinctive features, and terms for some types of kin are consistently linguistically marked. These observations can be formalized in the newly developed framework of linguistic Optimality Theory: permutations in the rank order of a small set of constraints generate basic types of kin terminology without over-generating rare or non-existent types. The result, I argue, is evidence for an innate faculty of social cognition (including several universal schemas of social relationships), apparently shaped by several kinds of genetic kin selection.