Methodological foundations of the linguistic approach to assessing the derivational potential of kinship terms with the integration of corpus data and comparative analysis in a multilingual context

the study of kinship terms occupies a central place in linguistic anthropology and comparative-historical linguistics, as this lexico-semantic group is universal for all cultures yet reflects unique social structures and worldviews. Traditional analysis focuses on semantics, naming systems, and etymology; however, the derivational potential of these terms – their ability to serve as the basis for new words—remains insufficiently explored, especially in a comparative perspective. The lack of a unified methodology for objectively evaluating and comparing word-formation activity across languages means that classical lexicographic approaches fail to account for actual productivity in living speech, overlooking the frequency and pragmatic significance of derivatives. This work aims to develop and test methodological foundations for assessing the derivational potential of kinship terms by integrating linguistic analysis of word-formation nests, quantitative data from national corpora, and comparative analysis in a multilingual context. This approach allows one to move from intuitive evaluations to objective indicators, revealing universal and culturally specific derivation patterns and their role in enriching vocabulary and conceptualizing the world. The quantitative analysis results demonstrated significant cross-linguistic differences: the highest DAC was found in Russian (average 0.872), intermediate in Tatar (0.654), and lowest in English (0.573). Semantic classification revealed the dominance of qualitative derivatives in English (45.2%), abstract in Tatar (35.8%), and a balanced distribution in Russian. Affix productivity was highest for -лык/-лек in Tatar (IPA 9.84), -ств- in Russian (9.38), and -ly in English (7.93). Correlational analysis confirmed a strong link between the frequency of the base term and its derivational potential in Russian (r=0.887) and Tatar (r=0.794), but a weak one in English (r=0.412).

derivational potential, kinship terms, corpus analysis, comparative linguistics, word formation