Kinship terms in the Greek language: a study of gambrós and pentherós

Abstract

This project aims at the investigation of the terms gambrós and pentherós - kinship terms that indicate affines from a masculine perspective - in their occurrences from the eighth century BC to the fourth century BC, regarding three aspescts: etymology, semantics and pragmatics. Previous works which study kinship terminology in protoindo-european will help to establish the origin and a brief history of gambrós and pentherós. This way, these terms will be analysed from an etymological perspective, a first step which will serve as basis for a semantic research about these two terms. Investigating their semantics is necessary because of the changes in their meanings from eighth century BC to fourth century BC. In Homer, gambrós can mean "son-in-law" or "brother-in-law", and pentherós, just "father-in-law"; on the other hand, these terms seem almost synonyms in tragedies, meaning "affine". Because of that, a contribution at which this work aims is a systematization in charts of the occurrences of gambrós and pentherós from eighth century BC to fourth century BC and an analysis of the changes in the meaning of these terms. Finally, we point out that the utilization of these terms is not random: there are literary purposes behind their usages that can be understood through an analysis with pragmatic criteria. Therefore, speaker, listener, referential, purpose of the discourse etc. will be factors taken into account in another systematization in charts and in an analysis of the pragmatics of the occurrences of gambrós and pentherós. Thus, this work will unite linguistic and literary investigation through the research of these kinship terms. (AU)