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Sound change versus lexical change for subgrouping Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Sara Pacchiarotti, Guy Kouarata, Koen Bostoen
This article focuses on languages of the Kwilu-Ngounie subbranch within a branch of the Bantu language family known as West-Coastal Bantu. Within Kwilu-Ngounie, B70 and B80 languages emerge as paraphyletic in the most comprehensive lexicon-based phylogeny of the branch. We assess whether the impossibility to group them into lexicon-based monophyletic subgroups can be bypassed by using the phonological
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Likelihood calculation in a multistate model of vocabulary evolution for linguistic dating Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Philipp Rönchen, Tilo Wiklund, Harald Hammarström
Computational methods of language dating make inferences about the divergence times of protolanguages by evaluating the patterns of inheritance in the vocabulary of modern languages, given the specification of a model of vocabulary evolution. We consider a model that describes vocabulary evolution as the replacement of traits by new traits from an infinite state space along a tree. This model has been
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Rates of change and phylogenetic signal in Mixtec tone Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Sandra Auderset
Despite the abundance of tonal languages around the world, the diachrony of tone is still poorly understood, especially when compared to segmental sound change. This lacuna has contributed to the untested assumption that tones are inherently unstable and change unpredictably. This paper addresses the questions of whether tones change faster than segments and whether tones show less phylogenetic signal
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The halfway similarity avoidance rule replicated using phonetic data from European language varieties Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Matías Guzmán Naranjo, Søren Wichmann
Previous work using lexical data from around the world has suggested that distances between language varieties are distributed such that varieties are typically either rather similar, qualifying as dialects of the same language, or rather dissimilar, qualifying as different languages, with a scarcity of varieties that are around halfway similar. Using a potentially biased sample, Wichmann (2019) observed
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Morphological diffusion and the internal subgrouping of Central Totonac Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 David Beck
The Totonac branch of the Totonacan (also known as Totonac-Tepehua) family is traditionally broken down into four divisions—Misantla, Northern, Sierra, and Lowland. Misantla is an obvious outlier, but the relationship among the remaining three, which comprise the Central Totonac division, is uncertain due to competing lines of evidence: lexical isoglosses group Sierra and Lowland against Northern while
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Speaking Xhosa multilingually: A study of contact innovations among Xhosa speakers in Soweto Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Rajend Mesthrie, Lulu Mfazwe-Mojapelo
Although code-switching has been quite well studied as a worldwide phenomenon, closer attention to effects on the more localized language involved is needed, especially in the repertoires of younger, well-educated speakers speaking in a multilingual mode. We argue that their language shows creativity going well beyond older instances of borrowing and code-switching into a “third space” grammar, which
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Pairing peers and pears: Changing conventions of Gheg Albanian heritage speakers Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-08-02 Barbara Sonnenhauser, Blertë Ismajli, Paul Widmer
Migration events splitting speaker communities and establishing novel contact situations are among the major drivers of language variation and change. While the precise processes that lead to change cannot usually be determined for past events with any certainty, the study of minority and heritage language usage in apparent time may provide insight into the contribution of the linguistic behavior underlying
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Dialect differences and linguistic divergence: A crosslinguistic survey of grammatical variation Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-02 John Mansfield, Henry Leslie-O’Neill, Haoyi Li
This article presents a new type of comparative linguistic survey, analyzing (socio)linguistic variation in a database of 1,155 grammatical constructions drawn from 42 diverse languages. We focus in particular on variation in the expression of grammatical meanings, and the extent to which grammatical variation differentiates geographic dialects. This is the first study we know of to present a systematic
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Reconstructing variation in Indo-European word order: A treebank-based quantitative study Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-02 Erica Biagetti, Guglielmo Inglese, Chiara Zanchi, Silvia Luraghi
Word order is a central issue in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European syntax. Categorical approaches have proved to be inadequate because they postulate for the protolanguage a typological consistency which is absent in any of the attested daughter languages. Following recent research, we adopt a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences as a continuous variable. We
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Annotating cognates in phylogenetic studies of Southeast Asian languages Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-05 Mei-Shin Wu, Johann-Mattis List
Compounding and derivation are frequent in many language families. As a consequence, words in different languages are often only partially cognate, sharing some but not all morphemes. While partial cognates do not constitute a problem for the phonological reconstruction of individual morphemes, they are problematic for phylogenetic reconstruction based on comparative word lists. We review current practices
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Phonological neighborhood complexity and sound change Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-19 Eva Maria Luef
The significance of the phonological neighborhood on lexical processing has been documented by decades of studies in the field, and it has become clear that the phonological connectivity of the mental lexicon is a crucial facilitator for word learning in both the production and perception domains. What has remained underrepresented in the literature to date is the question of how phonological or phonetic
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Divergence and contact in Southern Bantu language and population history: A new phylogeny in cross-disciplinary perspective Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-07 Hilde Gunnink, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri, Koen Bostoen
In this paper we present a new, lexicon-based phylogeny of 34 Southern Bantu languages, and combine it with previous insights from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to study the history of Southern Bantu languages and their speakers. Our phylogeny shows all Southern Bantu languages to derive from a single, direct ancestor, which contrasts with archaeological evidence indicating separate migrations
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Competing constructions construct complementary niches: A diachronic view on the English dative alternation Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-08-17 Eva Zehentner
This paper traces the history of the English dative alternation by means of a quantitative analysis of instances of both the nominal and the prepositional construction in a corpus of Middle English (PPCME2), and compares the results to Wolk et al.’s (2013) data set from ARCHER. I show that the factors impacting the choice of one pattern over the other are subject to change over time: construction choice
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Primal consonants and the evolution of consonant inventories Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-06-27 Joan Bybee, Shelece Easterday
Lindblom and Maddieson (1988) observe that “basic” consonants occur in all consonant inventories, but that larger inventories additionally include “elaborated” consonants, which depart from neutral phonation modes, places, and manners of articulation. The hypothesis that larger inventories arise from the smaller ones via sound change is tested here using a database of phonetic processes cataloged from
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The dialect chain of the Timor-Alor-Pantar language family Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-05-20 Gereon A. Kaiping, Marian Klamer
This paper refines the subgroupings of the Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) family of Papuan languages, using a systematic Bayesian phylogenetics study. While recent work indicates that the TAP family comprises a Timor (T) branch and an Alor-Pantar (AP) branch (Holton et al., 2012; Schapper et al., 2017), the internal structure of the AP branch has proven to be a challenging issue, and earlier studies leave
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A sociolinguistic-typological approach to the linguistic prehistory of South Asia: Two case studies Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-03-25 John Peterson
The present study compares two Indo-Aryan languages, Sadri and Konkani, with respect to their morphological complexity. Based on assumptions made in sociolinguistic typology (e.g., Trudgill, 2011), which forms part of a larger research program investigating the effects of social factors on language structures, this study attempts to reconstruct various aspects of prehistoric society based on the structures
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A chain shift in Indo-Aryan, with special reference to Gujarati dialects Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2021-12-10 Rajend Mesthrie
This paper explores a possible chain shift in Gujarati dialects, involving the consonants k, kh, c, ch, s, ś, h, ḥ, V̤, and ∅ (where ś denotes IPA [ʃ], ḥ voiceless [h], V̤ a murmured vowel, and ∅ “zero”). The chain shift can be discerned by comparing the colloquial forms in the regional dialects with the standard Gujarati forms and those of Central Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi. This comparison yields
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Sociogeographic correlates of typological variation in northwestern Bantu gender systems Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-01-07 Annemarie Verkerk, Francesca Di Garbo
This paper investigates the sociolinguistic factors that impact the typology and evolution of grammatical gender systems in northwestern Bantu, the most diverse area of the Bantu-speaking world. We base our analyses on a typological classification of 179 northwestern Bantu languages, focusing on various instances of semantic agreement and their role in the erosion of gender marking. In addition, we
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Language change in multidimensional space: New methods for modelling linguistic coherence Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2021-08-04 Xia Hua, Felicity Meakins, Cassandra Algy, Lindell Bromham
Linguistic coherence—the co-variation of language variants within speaker repertoires—has been proposed as a key process driving the divergence of language dialects. Previous studies on coherence have been often limited by dataset sizes and analyses. We analyze the use of 185 variables across 78 speakers from the Gurindji community in Australia. We use two multivariate statistical approaches to test
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How long is ‘a long term’ for sound change?: The effect of duration of immersion on the adoption of ongoing sound change Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2021-06-29 Cesko C. Voeten
This paper investigates the adoption of ongoing community sound change by individuals by considering it as an instance of second-dialect acquisition. Four ongoing changes in Dutch, all involving the move from one-allophone to two-allophone systems, make this possible: these ongoing diachronic changes are simultaneously a source of synchronic variation between Netherlandic Dutch and Flemish Dutch. The
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FAAL: a Feature-based Aligning ALgorithm Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2021-03-04 Marwan Kilani
In this article I present FAAL, a new Feature-based Aligning ALgorithm that can be used for the alignment of phonetically transcribed lexical items according to the comparison of phonetic features. The algorithm can be run on any pair of phonetically transcribed words without requiring any specific setting or tuning, although various parameters of its implementation as .jar library can indeed be modified
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The glottometrics of Arabic: Quantifying linguistic diversity and correlating it with diachronic change Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2021-03-04 Robert R. Ratcliffe
This paper presents a methodology for quantifying diversity within a group of related languages and correlating the patterns found with known historical developments, as a way of testing a variety of hypotheses, regarding subclassification, reconstruction, the influence of language contact, the relative consistency of the speed of language change, etc. The methodology is applied to Arabic dialects
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The impact of language contact on the Quechua varieties of Northern Peru: Exploring the lexical evidence Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2021-03-04 Matthias Urban
Studies of language contact in the Central Andes of Peru and Bolivia have focused strongly on the present-day contact situation between Quechua and Spanish, and the intricate and multilayered contact relationship between the Quechua and Aymara lineages. There are fewer studies of the influence of Quechua on minor non-Quechua languages of the Andes, and still fewer studies which, conversely, explore
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On cause and correlation in language change: Word order and clefting in Brazilian Portuguese Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2021-03-04 Malte Rosemeyer, Freek Van de Velde
Studies of language change frequently wrestle with the problem of cause and correlation. It is comparatively simple to observe a correlation between historical trends. However, it is much more difficult to demonstrate that the changes in the frequency of a construction A were indeed the cause of the changes in the frequency of a construction B. We present a statistical method that can help to assess
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From order to approval: The case of Hebrew beseder (okay/fine) Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2021-03-02 Hagit Shefer
The article discusses the development of the Hebrew polysemous construction bɛsɛdɛr (the prefixed preposition bɛ ‘in’ + the noun sɛdɛr ‘order’). An analysis within the framework of Construction Grammar (Traugott & Trousdale, 2013) as well as tendencies of (inter)subjectification (Traugott, 2010, 2012) suggest that the construction developed through fusion and host-class expansion from an objective
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Numeral classifiers and number marking in Indo-Iranian: A phylogenetic approach Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-10-29 Chundra A. Cathcart, Andreas Hölzl, Gerhard Jäger, Paul Widmer, Balthasar Bickel
This paper investigates the origins of sortal numeral classifiers in the Indo-Iranian languages. While these are often assumed to result from contact with non-Indo-European languages, an alternative possibility is that classifiers developed as a response to the rise of optional plural marking. This alternative is in line with the so-called Greenberg-Sanches-Slobin (henceforth GSS) generalization. The
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An agent-based model of sign language persistence informed by real-world data Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-09-10 Katie Mudd, Connie de Vos, Bart de Boer
As evidence from sign languages is increasingly used to investigate the process of language emergence and evolution, it is important to understand the conditions that allow for sign languages to persist. We build on a mathematical model of sign language persistence (i.e. protection from loss) which takes into account the genetic transmission of deafness, the cultural transmission of sign language and
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Converging evidence: Network structure effects on conventionalization of gestural referring expressions Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-09-10 Russell Richie, Matthew L. Hall, Pyeong Whan Cho, Marie Coppola
New languages emerge through interactions among people, yet the role of social network structure in language emergence is not clear, despite research from experimental semiotics, observational fieldwork, and computational modeling. To better understand the effects of social network structure on the formation of conventional referring expressions, we use a silent gesture paradigm that combines the methodological
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Empirical foundations for an integrated study of language evolution Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-09-10 Gareth Roberts, Betsy Sneller
Half a century ago, Uriel Weinreich, William Labov, and Marvin Herzog laid out a programmatic vision for the study of language change. This included establishing five fundamental problems for the field and a radical shift from a focus on idiolects to a focus on population-level change (grounded in their concept of orderly heterogeneity). They also expressed an explicit desire to see an integrated evolutionary
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Environmental adaptation in language: Spatial grammar, landscape knowledge and human survival Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-09-10 Magnus Pharao Hansen, Carolyn O’Meara
We argue that the human ability to linguistically describe spatial locations, relations and paths is likely to contribute importantly to human survival, and that consequently the relation between linguistic elements and structures used in spatial reference, and the environment in which humans navigate, ought to be of concern for evolutionary studies of language. We make the case for systematically
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Iconicity and interpretability in language emergence: Constraints on the emergence of the use of space in sign languages Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-09-10 Carla L. Hudson Kam, Oksana Tkachman
The iconic potential of sign languages suggests that the establishment of a conventionalized set of form-meaning pairings should be relatively easy. However, even an iconic form has to be interpreted correctly for it to conventionalize. In sign languages, spatial modulations are used to indicate real spatial relationships (locative) and grammatical relations. The former is a more-or-less direct representation
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Directionals and re-autonomization in Dutch modals Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-08-14 Jan Nuyts, Wim Caers
Modal auxiliaries in Present Day Dutch are going through a process of ‘re-autonomization’, i.e. they are increasingly used without a main verb elsewhere in the clause, in ways which are not possible in other Germanic languages. Many Germanic languages do allow omission of the main verb when a modal is combined with a directional phrase in the clause. This paper investigates whether the latter phenomenon
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The evolutionary trends of grammatical gender in Indo-Aryan languages Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-07-29 Marc Allassonnière-Tang, Michael Dunn
This paper infers the processes of development and change of grammatical gender in Indo-Aryan languages using phylogenetic comparative methods. 48 Indo-Aryan languages are coded based on 44 presence-absence features relating to gender marking on the verbs, adjectives, personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive pronouns. A Bayesian Reverse Jump Hyper Prior analysis, which infers the evolutionary
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Diachronic evidence against source-oriented explanation in typology: Evolution of prepositional phrases in Ancient Greek Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-06-26 Ilja A. Seržant, Dariya Rafiyenko
Source-oriented explanation in typology challenges a number of well-established universals, including the correlational universals of harmonic ordering of heads and dependents. It dispenses with functional or cognitive explanations of these because harmonic orders may simply be explained as one order emerging from the other and thus as historical accidents. We provide twofold evidence against this
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Language evolution research in the year 2020: A survey of new directions Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-06-15 Jonas Nölle, Stefan Hartmann, Peeter Tinits
This introductory paper reviews recent advances in language evolution research and summarizes the contributions of the special issue “New Directions in Language Evolution Research” in the broader context of these developments. Specifically, we discuss the increasing role of multimodality and iconicity, the more integrative view of language dynamics that has arguably broadened the scope of language
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Prehistoric languages and human self-domestication Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-02-10 Antonio Benítez-Burraco
The comparative method has enabled us to trace distant phylogenetic relationships among languages and reconstruct extinct languages from the past. Nonetheless, it has limitations, mostly resulting from the circumstance that languages also change by contact with unrelated languages and in response to external factors, particularly, aspects of human cognition and features of our physical and cultural
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Theory of mind as a proxy for Palaeolithic language ability: An alternative to the search for the earliest symbolic material culture Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-02-10 Cory Marie Stade
Symbolic artefacts have long been archaeology’s primary contribution to tracing the origin and subsequent development of human language. But the identification and interpretation of symbolic behaviour poses numerous interpretive problems, particularly before the Upper Palaeolithic where clearly referential forms of symbolic material are rare. As an alternative, theory of mind is presented here, detailing
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Quantifying the dynamics of topical fluctuations in language Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2020-02-10 Andres Karjus, Richard A. Blythe, Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith
The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements in texts, with changes in frequency taken to reflect the popularity or selective fitness of an element. However, corpus frequencies may change for a wide variety
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Introduction to the special issue on intentional language change Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-08-08 Bart Jacobs
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Games with names: Naming practices and deliberate language change Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-08-08 Anne Storch
This paper discusses deliberate changes surrounding the practice of naming (people and objects). I first present a discussion of naming and healing, and then turn to the act of naming as an active agent for language change in the context of praise names and names that are used as comments on social change. There are particularly rich areas where the deliberate, creative change of language is strikingly
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Intentional language change and the connection between mixed languages and genderlects Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-08-08 Peter Bakker
This paper links genderlects and mixed languages. Both may have their roots in a gender dichotomy, where two distinct populations come together and blend into a new one, with different linguistic consequences. Mixed languages are generally assumed to be the result of deliberate or conscious language change and often come about as the result of an act of identity, connected to the birth of a new social
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Metalinguistic comments as a tool for bottom-up language policy Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-08-08 Margreet Dorleijn
This article demonstrates that analyzing evaluative metalinguistic comments on linguistic features can be a valuable diagnostic tool in understanding how emergent varieties develop and conventionalize. The paper provides a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of metalinguistic activity as part of the diverse sociolinguistic research disciplines. It then discusses what constitutes an evaluative
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The tune drives the text: Competing information channels of speech shape phonological systems Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-08-08 Timo B. Roettger, Martine Grice
In recent years there has been increasing recognition of the vital role of intonation in speech communication. While contemporary models represent intonation—the tune—and the text that bears it on separate autonomous tiers, this paper distils previously unconnected findings across diverse languages that point to important interactions between these two tiers. These interactions often involve vowels
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What multiethnolects reveal about creole genesis Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-08-08 John McWhorter
Recent theories of creole genesis propose that creole languages did not emerge via the expansion of pidgin varieties (DeGraff, 2001; Mufwene, 2001, 2008). This paper argues that the multiethnolects that have formed in many European cities constitute a demonstration case of the genesis scenario these new creolist theories reconstruct. Crucially, however, the multiethnolects, while displaying a modest
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Motivation in pidgin and creole genesis Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-08-08 Mikael Parkvall
Almost all creolists see creole formation as a case of (failed) second language acquisition. I argue that there are good reasons to distinguish between second language acquisition and pidginisation/creolisation, and that little is gained by equating the two. While learners have an extant language as their target, pidginisers typically aim to communicate (in any which way) rather than to acquire a specific
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Areal dependency of consonant inventories Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-05-17 Dmitry Nikolaev
This paper discusses the impact of linguistic contact on the make-up of consonantal inventories of the languages of Eurasia. New measures for studying the importance of language contact for the development of phonological inventories are proposed, and two empirical studies are reported. First, using two different measures of dissimilarity of phonemic inventories (the Jaccard dissimilarity measure and
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What speakers know—or don’t know—about history and about typology Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-05-17 Brian D. Joseph
I explore here how aware speakers are of the history of their language as they use it and how aware of typology they are. I advocate for a speaker-oriented viewpoint and argue ultimately that speakers know little to nothing about language history and less about typology, and yet they behave in ways that essentially create typology and history. I offer a number of examples, mainly from Sanskrit and
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Modeling change in contact settings: A case study of phonological convergence Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-05-17 Katia Chirkova, Tao Gong
Convergence is an oft-used notion in contact linguistics and historical linguistics. Yet it is problematic as an explanatory account for the changes it represents. In this study, we model one specific case of convergence (Duoxu, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language with 9 remaining speakers) to contribute to a more systematic understanding of the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. The goals are
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Dynamic preferences and self-actuation of changes in language dynamics Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2019-05-17 Jérôme Michaud
A puzzling fact about linguistic norms is that they are mainly stable, but the conventional variant sometimes changes. These transitions seem to be mostly S-shaped and, therefore, directed. Previous models have suggested possible mechanisms to explain these directed changes, mainly based on a bias favoring the innovative variant. What is still debated is the origin of such a bias. In this paper, we
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Linguistic diversification as a long-term effect of asymmetric priming: An adaptive-dynamics approach Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Andreas Baumann, Lotte Sommerer
This paper tries to narrow the gap between diachronic linguistics and research on population dynamics by presenting a mathematical model corroborating the notion that the cognitive mechanism of asymmetric priming can account for observable tendencies in language change. The asymmetric-priming hypothesis asserts that items with more substance are more likely to prime items with less substance than the
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Three tree priors and five datasets: A study of Indo-European phylogenetics Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Taraka Rama
The age of the root of the Indo-European language family has received much attention since the application of Bayesian phylogenetic methods by Gray and Atkinson (2003). With the application of new models, the root age of the Indo-European family has tended to decrease from an age that supported the Anatolian origin hypothesis to an age that supports the Steppe origin hypothesis (Chang et al., 2015)
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A new approach to concept basicness and stability as a window to the robustness of concept list rankings Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Johannes Dellert, Armin Buch
Based on a recently published large-scale lexicostatistical database, we rank 1,016 concepts by their suitability for inclusion in Swadesh-style lists of basic stable concepts. For this, we define separate measures of basicness and stability. Basicness in the sense of morphological simplicity is measured based on information content, a generalization of word length which corrects for distorting effects
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Testing an agent-based model of language choice on sociolinguistic survey data Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Andres Karjus, Martin Ehala
The paper outlines an agent-based model for language choice in multilingual communities and tests its performance on samples of data drawn from a large-scale sociolinguistic survey carried out in Estonia. While previous research in the field of language competition has focused on diachronic applications, utilizing rather abstract models of uniform speakers, we aim to model synchronic language competition
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Armenian prosody in typology and diachrony Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2018-06-22 Jessica DeLisi
This paper examines the relationship between typology and historical linguistics through a case study from the history of Armenian, where two different stress systems are found in the modern language. The first is a penult system with no associated secondary stress ([… σ́σ]ω). The other, the so-called hammock pattern, has primary stress on the final syllable and secondary stress on the initial syllable
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Copystree: Gaming artificial phylogenies Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2018-06-22 Simone Pompei, Vittorio Loreto, Francesca Tria
The reconstruction of phylogenies of cultural artefacts represents an open problem that mixes theoretical and computational challenges. Existing benchmarks rely on simulated phylogenies, where hypotheses on the underlying evolutionary mechanisms are unavoidable, or on real data phylogenies, for which no true evolutionary history is known. Here we introduce a web-based game, Copystree, where users create
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The effect of dictionary omissions on phylogenies computationally inferred from lexical data Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2018-06-22 Igor Yanovich
Lexical datasets used for computational phylogenetic inference suffer a unique type of data error. Some words actually present in a language may be absent from the dataset at no fault of its curators: especially for lesser-studied languages, a word may be missing from all available sources such as dictionaries. It is thus important to be able to (i) check how robust one’s inferences are to dictionary
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Using ancestral state reconstruction methods for onomasiological reconstruction in multilingual word lists Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2018-06-22 Gerhard Jäger, Johann-Mattis List
Current efforts in computational historical linguistics are predominantly concerned with phylogenetic inference. Methods for ancestral state reconstruction have only been applied sporadically. In contrast to phylogenetic algorithms, automatic reconstruction methods presuppose phylogenetic information in order to explain what has evolved when and where. Here we report a pilot study exploring how well
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Making genealogical language classifications available for phylogenetic analysis: Newick trees, unified identifiers, and branch length Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2018-06-22 Dan Dediu
One of the best-known types of non-independence between languages is caused by genealogical relationships due to descent from a common ancestor. These can be represented by (more or less resolved and controversial) language family trees. In theory, one can argue that language families should be built through the strict application of the comparative method of historical linguistics, but in practice
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Diachronic Construction Grammar, edited by Jóhanna Barðdal, Elena Smirnova, Lotte Sommerer, and Spike Gildea Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Meike Pentrel
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The Future of Dialects: Selected Papers from Methods in Dialectology XV., edited by Marie-Hélène Côté, Remco Knooihuizen, and John Nerbonne Language Dynamics and Change (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Frans L.M.P. Hinskens