Language evolution at the crossroad between comparative and phylogenetic linguistics
Language evolution at the crossroad between comparative and phylogenetic linguistics
Chaired by Gerd Carling
Language evolution deals with the principles of language change and the methods for classifying and observing patterns of change over time. In linguistics, there are two models that serve this purpose, the historical-comparative and phylogenetic methods. Even though these models correspond in their aims and objectives, the methods and instruments used to achieve the goals are fundamentally different. The current symposium will search for the crossroad between the two models, focusing on two objectives: 1) building infrastructures for big data in comparative-phylogenetic linguistics, and 2) comparative-evolutionary methods for reconstructing language change. The symposium will begin by an overview by the organizer, discussing, first, platform models of empirical data for integrating the models. Second, the introduction will deal with methods of semantic reconstruction as well as morphosyntactic reconstruction, with a special focus on the Indo-European language family. Individual talks will investigate sound change, lexical change rates, parallel drift, and lexical iconicity.
Relaxing the comparative method: probabilistic approaches to sound change
Chundra A. Cathcart, Department of Comparative Linguistics, University of Zurich
The comparative-historical method is one of the oldest tools in the field of Linguistics, and several important developments have attested to its rigor (e.g., the confirmation of Saussure's sonantic coefficients by the discovery of Hittite). However, the method faces challenges when applied to contemporary languages long in contact with each other. I present two case studies involving Bayesian models of sound change and dialect mixture designed to tease apart regular diachronic trends and language contact among Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages, and the implications for social and human history in South and Central Asia.
On the rate of lexical change
Harald Hammarström & Philipp Rönchen, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University
The ability to reliably date historical stages of (proto)-languages would allow us to connect linguistic data with archaeological evidence and shed new light on the historical development of languages. However, it is widely accepted that linguistic dating assuming a constant replacement rate in the lexicon – glottochronology in the classical sense – gives far too inaccurate results (Bergsland & Vogt 1962, Blust 2000, Holman et al. 2011). Recently, large lexical databases have been amassed that allow us to investigate the variation in lexical change more closely. In the present talk we will look at the statistical regularities of empirical rates of lexical change and discuss some potential reasons for deviant rates.
Sound-color perception as a window into the fundamental part of the lexicon and linguistic primitives
Niklas Johansson & Andrey Anikin, General Linguistics, Center for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Cognitive Science, Department of Philosophy, Lund University
Color plays a crucial role in culture, perception and basic vocabulary, and people generally have strong, sometimes synesthetic associations between sound and color. This type of correlation can help us understand how description concepts are categorized and evolve. The present talk describes how cross-modal perception experiments and lexical color term data from 245 language families reveal the underlying parameters of sound-color correspondences in evolution and change. Our findings show that quantitative dimensions (luminance, loudness) dominate over qualitative ones (hue, vowel quality) which correlate with cross-linguistic lexicalization patterns of color terms and by pitch-to-luminance mappings found in toddlers and chimpanzees.
Getting Sapir’s drift: Parallel evolution in linguistic as in biological systems
Erich R. Round, Ancient Language Lab, School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland, Australia; Surrey Morphology Group, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Phylogenetic methods can reveal evolutionary patterns, the evidence for which is subtle and widely distributed across a language family. Here, we answer the century-old question of whether diverging languages undergo parallel grammatical evolution. Biological counterparts to the question indicate that homoplasious grammatical development should not only exist, but also vary in magnitude according to grammatical units’ entrenchment in their background linguistic system. Using phylogenetic reconstruction of grammatical rates of evolution since Proto-Indo-European, we confirm our prediction, thus revealing a new property of linguistic evolution. Our discovery underscores the power of conceptualizing related languages as sets of orthologous, complete evolutionary systems.
References
Bergsland, Knut & Hans Vogt. (1962) On the Validity of Glottochronology. Current Anthropology 3(2). 115-153.
Blust, Robert. (2000) Why lexicostatistics doesn't work: the 'universal constant' hypothesis and the Austronesian languages. In Colin Renfrew, April McMahon & Robert Lawrence Trask (eds.), Time depth in historical linguistics (Papers in the prehistory of languages 2), 311-331. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Holman, Eric W., Cecil H. Brown, Søren Wichmann, André Müller, Viveka Velupillai, Harald Hammarström, Hagen Jung, Dik Bakker, Pamela Brown, Oleg Belyaev, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Johann-Mattis List & Dmitry Egorov. (2011) Automated dating of the world's language families. Current Anthropology 52(6). 841-875
Gerd Carling is Associate Professor in General Linguistics at Lund University in Lund, Sweden. Her main research interests are comparative-historical and evolutionary linguistics, linguistic philology, and language documentation. Her specializations include among others the extinct Indo-European language Tocharian and varieties of Romani chib. She has built a linguistic corpus and published a dictionary of Tocharian A. She has also written several books and a grammar of the Scandoromani language. Within the area of comparative and evolutionary linguistics, her most important contribution is the construction of a language infrastructure in the form of a geodatabase for systematic study of grammatical and lexical diversity, focusing on the areas of Eurasia and South America. Gerd Carling’s research is sponsored by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg and Crafoord Foundations.
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