Family and Kinship

Roles: parent, child, sibling, elder, caretaker, dependent, household, inheritance

The structure of biological and social kinship relationships, with their asymmetries of age, care, authority, and developmental stage. As a source domain, family foregrounds the distinction between the caretaker and the dependent, the persistence of early relational patterns into adulthood, and the idea that one entity can contain or carry another at a different developmental stage. Structurally productive because it encodes the temporal layering of self (the adult contains the child they once were), the obligation of the stronger to protect the weaker, and the way early relational templates shape later behavior.

As Source Frame (1)