Functionalist accounts of language suggest that forms are paired with meanings in ways that
support efficient communication. Previous work on grammatical marking suggests that word …

We examine the conceptual development of kinship through the lens of program induction.
We present a computational model for the acquisition of kinship term concepts, resulting in …

The universality of kinship terms means they are regarded, like much basic vocabulary, as
resistant to borrowing. Kin term borrowings are documented at varying frequencies, but their …

For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly
organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and …

Across the world people in different societies structure their family relationships in many
different ways. These relationships become encoded in their languages as kinship …

Together with language, music is perhaps our most distinctive behavioral trait. Following the
lead of evolutionary linguistic research, different hypotheses have been proposed to explain …

This study analyses the status of Iraqw kinship terms and provides their future implications.
The study offers insights into the resilience of Iraqw indigenous kinship terms and the …

Different domains exhibit different degrees of lexical precision. Existing work has suggested
that communicative need may modulate the precision of word meaning in individual …

The paper analyses on the basis of new fielddata the transformations of kinship
terminologies in three Even dialects which have come about through cultural and linguistic …

Systems of semantic categories vary across languages, and it has been proposed that this
variation is constrained by a need for efficiency in communication. An important element of …