The first thing to ask then about kinship terms is, whether they really "confuse," "merge" or "lump" the various relatives designated by the same term, or whether on the contrary each time they are used, they receive a distinct meaning, that is, refer to one individual only? As a matter of fact, in actual use kin ship terms have always a distinct and concrete meaning and there never is any doubt in the mind of the speaker or hearers as to who is designated in each case. The emotional tone in the first place usually indicates whether a word such as Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, Brother, Sister, is used towards or about "own" relatives, or merely "classificatory" ones. And emotional intona tion is an important part of phonetic equipment.
In the second place, there is always an additional apparatus of adjectives, suffixes and other circumlocutions which make it pos sible to specify whether the actual mother is meant or her sister, or yet another of those whom the classificatory term "mother" embraces. Recently, in Spencer and Gillen's new book (The Arunta, 1928) we are given a very rich auxiliary terminology of this kind, which proves that even in that stronghold of classifi catory kinship, Central Australia, there exist highly developed linguistic means for differentiating individuals within each class.
Finally we have the context of situation and narrative, the most powerful index of semantic discrimination of meaning in primitive languages. Thus in reality each so called classificatory term is a class label for a number of distinct words, every one of which has its own specific individual meaning. These individual words are in actual use differentiated from each other phonetically, by the index of emotional tone; lexicographically by the index of circumlocution; contextually by the index of situation. The individual meanings are moreover not built up in a haphazard manner; they are related to each other; they start with a main or primary reference; which then through successive extensions engenders a series of derived meanings.
above, VII.).
A deeper sociological analysis shows however that the problem of Maternity and that of Paternity are not so different.
XI. Biological and Sociological Parentage.—Biological factors, though important, are not, however, in human societies the omnipotent, exclusively determining element, which they appar ently are in animal ones (cf. I.). Legal rules, social institutions, moral and religious doctrines and practices deeply modify the ideas, sentiments and the behaviour of man. Kinship which in its final form, is a product of the institutions and doctrines of a society is always shaped by laws and normative ideas. Indeed there is no reason why the transformation should not go so far that the sentimental and legal bond between a child and its mother should not become collective instead of individual. Indeed a brilliant anthropologist (Rivers) has recently propounded the hypothesis of a sociological "group motherhood" as a correlate to "group marriage" and "group fatherhood" and this hypothesis has been made one of the foundation stones in a new matriarchal theory of primitive culture. (The Mothers by Briffault, 1927.) Thus both maternity and paternity are partly based on bio logical arrangements of the human organism and innate mental tendencies, and both are deeply modified by social institutions and norms. In both, the facts must be examined carefully; neither a mere zoological induction, nor plausibly brilliant hypotheses about the omnipotence of society can yield a satisfactory answer.