Abstract: The purpose of this paper was to probe the characteristic of conceptual structure of kinship words in Jinuo-middle-school-students’ mind, and to try to give the reasons for the structure. The subjects were 69 students (22 males and 47 famales) and all came from Jinuo middle school. The materials used were 62 kinship words from Zhang et al.’s (2004) study, including 10 core relative words, 20 In-laws, 18Uncle Cousins, 8 Second immediate relatives and 6 Foster relatives. Considering the characteristics of Jinuo nationality that it doesn’t have its own words, all words were presented randomly on a piece of paper in Chinese characters. The participants were asked to classify the 62 kinship words according to their own criteria in 30 minutes. The responses were analyzed using multi - dimensional scaling method. The results showed that about 32 percent of students sorted kinship terms into three categories. And the average classification category was 4.2. This was basically the same as the Han nationality students’ classification category. There were two dimensions in the conceptual structure of kinship words of Jinuo nationality，one was the intimate level of relative，and the other was considered as people／people who were looked after. There were both the same and difference between the conceptual structure of kinship words of Jinuo nationality and that of Han nationality. And in my opinion, these differences came from the Jinuo’s marriage system of Blood relationship, Malaya Relative system, and also with Jinuo in the language or languages characteristic and “direct transition” leapfrog development relevant. The main enlightenment to us for investigating kinship words concept structure is that while being about past traditional culture accumulation, should also pay attention to the social development of the cultural permeating and change.

Key words: Jinuo nationality, kinship, conceptal structure, reason

摘要： 运用自然分类和多维标度方法，探讨基诺族中学生的亲属词概念结构特点。结果发现，基诺族亲属词概念结构有两个维度：(1)亲密程度；(2)照顾者／被照顾者。这与汉族中学生的亲属词概念结构既有相同之处，又有明显差异。这与基诺族的血缘婚制度以及马来亚式亲属制度等历史积淀有关，也与基诺族跨越式发展中他文化的渗透和主文化的变迁有关。

关键词: 基诺族, 亲属词, 概念结构, 成因