The generative psychology of kinship: Part 2. Generating variation from universal building blocks with Optimality Theory

Abstract

Optimality Theory (OT), a new approach to rules of language, can be used to analyze variation and universals in kin classification. According to the theory, rules of language take the form of ranked constraints that filter random variation; grammatical differences between languages reflect different constraint rankings. Applied to kin terminology, OT provides an elegant account of how universal schemas of sociality generate different terminologies for aunts, uncles, and cousins that merge and separate various kin types, and why many logically possible terminologies are rare or nonexistent. The theory may help to narrow gaps between cognitive–linguistic accounts of kin terminology and sociological accounts, and between domain-specific and domain-general views of cognition. A companion paper discusses principles of kin classification and the evolutionary psychology of kinship.