An Ontological Analysis of Japanese and Chinese Kinship Terms

An Ontological Analysis of Japanese and Chinese Kinship Terms* Songiy Baika and Hee-Rahk Chaeb Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Wangsan-ri, Mohyeon-myeon, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do 449-791, Korea {songiybaik, hrchae}@hufs.ac.kr Abstract. Most languages have some expressions to refer to family members (e.g., those referring to ‘father,’ ‘brother,’ ‘uncle,’ etc.). In this paper, we will provide an analysis of Japanese and Chinese kinship terms, under a framework whose representational system has an ontological nature. It will be shown that this framework is effective not only in figuring out similarities and differences among the kinship terms of a particular language, but also in comparing the kinship terms of different languages. Keywords: Kinship terms, Ontologies, Japanese kinship terms, Chinese kinship terms. * Hee-Rahk Chae was supported by a 2010 research grant from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Copyright 2010 by Songiy Baik, and Hee-Rahk Chae. 1 Introduction In a previous work (S Baik and H-R Chae 2010), we tried to provide an ontological analysis of Korean kinship terms. We dealt with about 200 Korean kinship terms extracted from the Yonsei Korean Dictionary, under a framework comprising a simplified family tree and some features. We have shown that the framework is effective in defining Korean kinship terms explicitly and comprehensively. In addition, as the framework was designed to be language neutral, the possibility was open that it could be used in analyzing the kinship terms of other languages. In this paper, we will first introduce the framework of S Baik and H-R Chae (2010). Then, we will provide an ontological analysis of Japanese and Chinese kinship terms. We will deal with all the Japanese and Chinese kinship terms in Kodansha’s Furigana Japanese Dictionary and A Chinese-English Dictionary (by Learning Express). We will see that the framework is very effective in dealing with the Japanese and Chinese data. This will show that the ontological framework has advantages over previous ones. Most of all, the framework makes it easy to capture similarities and differences between kinship terms in various languages. The organization of this paper is as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of some previous studies on kinship terms. In section 3, we will introduce an ontological framework for the analysis of kinship terms, together with actual analyses of Japanese and Chinese data. Section 4 concludes the paper. 2 Previous Studies on Kinship Terms Previous studies on kinship terms were carried out by anthropologists as well as by linguists. Some of them have attempted to show properties of kinship terms by using such analytical mechanisms as “componential analysis” (Wallace & Atkins 1960), “algebraic analysis” (Romney & D’Andrade 1964), and “morphemic or morphological analysis” (H-K Kim 1967, 1983). Although these mechanisms are based on convincing assumptions on kinship terms, they are often too complex and too restricted to deal with kinship terms comprehensively. In this PACLIC 24 Proceedings 349 section, we will briefly observe some systems implementing the three mechanisms mentioned above. Wallace and Atkins (1960) try to represent the conceptual meaning of …

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