Lexical universals of kinship and social cognition

Jones recognizes the existence of primitives of conceptual structures, out of which local representations of kinship are constructed. NSM semantics has identified these primitives through a cross-linguistic search for lexical universals ( NSM stands for Natural Semantic Metalanguage and also for the corresponding linguistic theory). These empirical universals provide, I argue, a better bridge between cognitive anthropology and evolutionary psychology than the constructs of OT, with dubious claim to conceptual reality.