English and Gurung Kinship Terms :A Comparative Study

Abstract

The research entitled"A Comparative Linguistic Study: Englishand Gurung Kinship Terms"presents a clear picture of comparative studybetween English and Gurung kinship terms. The present study has beendone through both consaguineal and affinal types across five generationsfrom both perspective viz. male and female ego in English and Gurung .The kinship relationships of English and Gurung have also been studied byboth addressive and appellativeuses from the perspectives of both maleand female ego. The Gurung data was taken through the native speakers of Gurungby applying oral structured interviews, which were based on pre-determined set of questions. The researcher collected data from Syangja district from two VDCs(Eladi and Manakamana) and one municipality (Waling) for Gurungkinship terms and he collected English kinship terms from the secondarysources such as previoustheses, books,magazines, internet etc. The main objectives of this study were to determine different termsused for English and Gurung kinship relations and to compare and contrastthose terms. The major findings are that Gurung language is rich in termsof kinship terms in comparison to the English language. And thesystemsof Gurung kinship term and English terms have the relations of Mono-Gurung vs. Multi English and Mono-English vs. Multi-Gurung. In additionto this, there is a slight difference between one to one correspondencerelationships of the appellative forms to signify the same relation of thegiven languages.This thesis has four chapters. The first chapter consists of generalbackground, literature review, objectives of the study, significance of thestudy and definition of various kinship terminologies. Similarly, the second chapter contains sources of data, population ofthe study, sampling procedure, research tools and process of datacollection and limitation of the study. Likewise, the third chapter includes analysis and interpretation ofthe data, which is main part of the thesis and finally, the fourth chapterconsists of findings, recommendations and pedagogical implications.