Talk Is Not Cheap: Kinship Terminologies and the Origins of Language - eScholarship

@inproceedings{Milicic2013TalkIN,
  title={Talk Is Not Cheap: Kinship Terminologies and the Origins of Language - eScholarship},
  author={B. Milicic},
  year={2013}
}
Kinship terminology is a human universal, a kind of cultural knowledge circulated through language. In this paper I explore the possibility that the need for social rules prompted the development of fully syntactic language via kinship terminologies. In other words, kinship terms are at the core of modern language. They require uniquely human cognitive features such as symbolic reference and recursiveness, which in turn require a cognitive capacity beyond that of non-human primates. The… Expand
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Complex Kinship Patterns as Evolutionary Constructions, and the Origins of Sociocultural Universals
Human societies share a large number of complex social traits relating to kinship, which together constitute what is called here the human kinship configuration. I use a comparative phylogenetic… Expand
Bioarchaeology and Kinship: Integrating Theory, Social Relatedness, and Biology in Ancient Family Research
Theoretical developments in sociocultural anthropology have transformed the study of kinship. Here, we review these theoretical developments, consider their influence on bioarchaeological kinship… Expand

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