Productivity of Chinese kinship terms

The Chinese system of kinship terms is one of the most complex in the world. Part of my research involves defining the productivity of Chinese kinship from a semantic model. A simplified model is shown in the table below, where a term for a family member of a given generation can be formed left-to-right using any of the available morphemes.

Table 1: Morphemes that form formal Chinese kinship terms
Second prefixes
First cousin relationship on the father’s brother’s side: tang

Any other first cousin relationship: biao Prefix: specify indirect descent

Paternal uncle: bo Paternal aunt: gu Maternal uncle: jiu Maternal aunt: yi Brother’s child: zhi Sister’s child: sheng

Roots (forms the base of the word; specifies generation)
Great-grandparent: zengzu
Grandparent: zu

Elder brother: ge Elder sister: jie Younger brother: di Younger sister: mei

Child: er
Other relative: (null) Grandchild: sun Great-grandchild: zengsun Suffixes: specify the gender Male: fu
Female: mu
Male in-law: fu
Female in-law: xifu
Male: zi (optional)
Female: nu
Male in-law: nuxu
Female in-law: xifu

Each morpheme adds a computational element to the relationship. To use our previous example, tangzhisunxifu (paternal male cousin’s granddaughter-in-law) contains four morphemes. The base word sun specifies a grandchild, but adding the suffix -xifu indicates the relation is a female in-law, produces sunxifu (granddaughter-in-law). Adding the prefix zhi- indicates the relation is not one’s own descendant, but through one’s brother’s child’s line: zhixifu (grandniece-in-law). Finally, the further prefix tang- essentially turns the ‘brother’ in the relationship to a male cousin (specifically one’s father’s brother’s son): thus, tangzhisunxifu is one’s paternal male cousin’s granddaughter-in-law. An equivalent term in English might be first-cousin once-removed in- law, although this is far more artificial-sounding than the Chinese equivalent.

This system of compounding indicates a somewhat different outlook on familial relationships where distant relatives are given very specific terms, but ones that carry the same base as close relatives This speaks to the hierarchical, yet communal nature of historical Chinese society. Unlike in English, the term a cousin’s child carries the meanings of “nephew/niece” and “son/daughter”. Note that this system is extremely specific regarding the gender of each stage of the relationship. If the relationship had instead been a female cousin’s granddaughter-in-law, a different term would be used: tangwaishengsunxifu; and if the cousin was not the father’s brother’s child, another term again would be used: biaowaishengsunxifu.

My research also focusses on a concept called “markedness”, which describe how some words can be “marked” for a specific characteristic, whereas similar words may carry more general meanings. For example, many words that include “man”, such as “mankind” can refer generally to the human species whereas the equivalent terms including “woman”, such as “womankind” cannot refer to men. A very similar concept occurs in Chinese kinship terminology. The terms for maternal grandparents traditionally contain the morpheme wai-, which literally means ‘outsider’, as maternal relative were considered more exterior to the family in the historically patrilineal societies of China. There has been a trend in recent decades (particularly with changes in family structure due to the one-child policy) for children to address their maternal grandparents without such these marked morphemes, indicating a change in attitude toward patrilineality.
Overall, the complex system of Chinese kinship terminology contains much richer linguistic properties than has been thus considered, many of which have serious implications regarding the role of Chinese society today.

Baik, S. and H. Chae (2010). An Ontological Analysis of Japanese and Chinese Kinship Terms. Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

Qian, Y. and S.S. Piao (2007). Chinese Kinship Semantic Structure and Annotation Scheme. The Corpus Linguistics Conference 2007.