Kinship Terms as Forms of Address in Biblical Hebrew: Fictive and Literal Use

Kinship terms are used as forms of address both literally and fictively, i.e. addressing people whom the speaker is not related to neither by blood nor by marriage. A thorough analysis of the occurrences of kinship terms in the Hebrew Bible, with some remarks concerning contemporary Israeli Hebrew, demonstrates that fictive use prevails over literal use, playing a primary role in the definition of social relationships. The subject is approached from a discourse analysis perspective in the theoretical framework of the conceptual metaphor, exploring the relations between discourse and cognition as well as between discourse and power.