The Semantics of Kinship in Sinitic Languages

This chapter provides an overview of scholarly efforts to collect, codify, and explain kinship terms in Chinese history and research on kinship terms in Sinitic languages (Chinese dialects) in general and focuses primarily on distinctive Chinese approaches to the semantics of kinship terms and recent developments in Chinese kinship research. It places discussions of Chinese kinship semantics within the broad context of crosslinguistic, typological research of kinship semantics in contemporary anthropological and linguistic research. The chapter starts with a description of some influential approaches to kinship terms within these two disciplines. Some of these approaches have influenced recent studies of Chinese kinship semantics. It then discusses general approaches to kinship semantics in both Chinese and Anglophone scholarship, highlighting both their commonality and the distinctive aspects of Chinese approaches. This is followed by an account of recent developments in studies of Chinese kinship semantics, and a discussion of future directions.