Residue Analysis (Kinship Terminology)

Residue analysis is a componential, formal-semantic technique for defining the categories named by kinship terms. Each kin term is treated as a bundle of distinctive features — such as sex of relative, generation, and lineality — and the analyst seeks the minimal set of features that exactly picks out the genealogical positions the term covers. The cases a candidate definition fails to account for form the residue, and competing feature definitions are tested by which leaves the smallest, most principled residual. The method makes the implicit logic of a kin-term system explicit and falsifiable.