Semantic representation of Kinship systems

Four representational systems are examined with respect to their adequacy for representing reasoning processes within kinship systems; the systems are associative, semantic feature, logical predicate, and an “algebraic” one based on set mappings. The associative and semantic feature systems are shown to be inadequate, and the logical predicate system is shown to be somewhat clumsy and unintuitive. The algebraic is proposed as the correct representation of kinship terms. It is suggested that certain other conceptual domains can also be best represented by an algebraic system.