  In this study, we propose a corpus analysis of an area of the French lexicon
that is both dense and highly structured: the vocabulary of family
relationships. Starting with a lexicon of 25 nouns designating the main
relationships (son, cousin, mother, grandfather, sister-in-law etc.), we
examine how these terms are positioned in relation to each other through
distributional analyses based on the use of these terms in corpora. We show
that distributional information can capture certain features that organize this
vocabulary (descent, alliance, siblings, genre), in ways that vary according to
the different corpora compared.
