ORCID Profile
0000-0003-1910-3969
Current Organisations
University of Newcastle Australia
,
The University of Newcastle
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Publisher: Figshare
Date: 2016
Publisher: Figshare
Date: 2017
Publisher: Figshare
Date: 2016
Publisher: Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen
Date: 2015
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 02-02-2021
Abstract: Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data – in this instance, statistical phonotactics. We extract phonotactic data from 112 Pama-Nyungan vocabularies and apply tests for phylogenetic signal, quantifying the degree to which the data reflect phylogenetic history. We test three datasets: (1) binary variables recording the presence or absence of biphones (two-segment sequences) in a lexicon (2) frequencies of transitions between segments, and (3) frequencies of transitions between natural sound classes. Australian languages have been characterized as having a high degree of phonotactic homogeneity. Nevertheless, we detect phylogenetic signal in all datasets. Phylogenetic signal is greater in finer-grained frequency data than in binary data, and greatest in natural-class-based data. These results demonstrate the viability of employing a new source of readily extractable data in historical and comparative linguistics.
Publisher: Figshare
Date: 2016
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 20-11-2020
DOI: 10.3389/FPSYG.2020.570895
Abstract: Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped it. A storied distribution in linguistics has been Zipf's law, a kind of power law. In the wake of a major debate in the sciences around power-law hypotheses and the unreliability of earlier methods of evaluating them, here we re-evaluate the distributions claimed to characterize phoneme frequencies. We infer the fit of power laws and three alternative distributions to 166 Australian languages, using a maximum likelihood framework. We find evidence supporting earlier results, but also nuancing them and increasing our understanding of them. Most notably, phonemic inventories appear to have a Zipfian-like frequency structure among their most-frequent members (though perhaps also a lognormal structure) but a geometric (or exponential) structure among the least-frequent. We compare these new insights the kinds of causal processes that affect the evolution of phonemic inventories over time, and identify a potential account for why, despite there being an important role for phonetic substance in phonemic change, we could still expect inventories with highly erse phonetic content to share similar distributions of phoneme frequencies. We conclude with priorities for future work in this promising program of research.
Publisher: University of Queensland Library
Date: 2021
DOI: 10.14264/9D9E8BE
Publisher: Figshare
Date: 2017
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 28-02-2022
Abstract: Phylogenetic comparative methods are new in our field and are shrouded, for most linguists, in at least a little mystery. Yet the path that led to their discovery in comparative biology is so similar to the methodological history of balanced s ling, that it is only an accident of history that they were not discovered by a linguistic typologist. Here we clarify the essential logic behind phylogenetic comparative methods and their fundamental relatedness to a deep intellectual tradition focussed on s ling. Then we introduce concepts, methods and tools which will enable typologists to use these methods in everyday typological research. The key commonality of phylogenetic comparative methods and balanced s ling is that they attempt to deal with statistical non-independence due to genealogy. Whereas s ling can never achieve independence and requires most comparative data to be discarded, phylogenetic comparative methods achieve independence while retaining and using all comparative data. We discuss the essential notions of phylogenetic signal uncertainty about trees typological averages and proportions that are sensitive to genealogy comparison across language families and the effects of areality. Extensive supplementary materials illustrate computational tools for practical analysis and we illustrate the methods discussed with a typological case study of the laminal contrast in Pama-Nyungan.
Location: No location found
No related grants have been discovered for Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes.