A Comparison of Phylogenetic Reconstruction Methods on an Indo-European Dataset


Book Description

Researchers interested in the history of the Indo-European family of languages have used a variety of methods to estimate the phylogeny of the family, and have obtained widely differing results. In this paper we explore the reconstructions of the Indo-European phylogeny obtained by using the major phylogeny estimation procedures on an existing database of 336 characters (including lexical, phonological, and morphological characters) for 24 Indo-European languages. Our study finds that the different methods agree in part, but that there are also several striking differences. We discuss the reasons for these differences, and make proposals with respect to phylogenetic reconstruction in historical linguistics.




Proceedings of the 33rd Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference


Book Description

The Program in Indo-European Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, sponsors an Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. The Conference, held on campus every fall, welcomes participation by linguists, philologists, and others engaged in all aspects of Indo-European studies. Inhalt: - David W. Anthony: Ten Constraints that Limit the Late PIE Homeland to the Steppes - Dita Frantíkovková: Hittite Common-Gender āi-stems Revisited - Sander van Hes: The Ancient Greek Local Suffixes -θεν, -θε(ν), -θι, and -σε: Function and Origin - Valérie Jeffcott and Logan Neeson: The Proto-Indo-European Negative Polarity Item *kwené - Jesse Lundquist: The Source of Strength: ἀλκί, ἀλκι-, ἀναλκιδ-, and Related - Reuben Pitts: Long-Vowel Perfects and the Aorist-Perfect Merger in Italic - Alex Roy: Redundance and Recategorization in Indo-Iranian *námas- and Allies - Paolo Sabattini: Syllabification-Driven Changes in Mycenaean: The Case of Liquid Vocalization - Ryan Sandell: Towards a Prosodic History of Indic: A Parametric Analysis of the "Classical Sanskrit Stress Rule" - Pat Snidvongs: Rig Vedic √sac as a Semantic Transitivizer - Anthony D. Yates: The Unexceptional Stress of the "Endingless Locative" in Indo-European




The Method Works


Book Description




The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics provides a survey of the field covering the methods which underpin current work; models of language change; and the importance of historical linguistics for other subfields of linguistics and other disciplines. Divided into five sections, the volume encompass a wide range of approaches and addresses issues in the following areas: historical perspectives methods and models language change interfaces regional summaries Each of the thirty-two chapters is written by a specialist in the field and provides: a introduction to the subject; an analysis of the relationship between the diachronic and synchronic study of the topic; an overview of the main current and critical trends; and examples from primary data. The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area. Chapter 28 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315794013.ch28




Diachronic Syntax


Book Description

This second edition of Ian Roberts's highly successful textbook on diachronic syntax has been fully revised and updated throughout to take account of the multiple developments in the field in the last decade. The book provides a detailed account of how standard questions in historical linguistics - including word order change, grammaticalization, and reanalysis - can be explored in terms of current minimalist theory and Universal Grammar. This new edition offers expanded coverage of a range of topics, including null subjects, the Final-over-Final Condition, the diachrony of wh-movement, the Tolerance Principle, and creoles and creolization, and explores further advances in the theory of parametric variation. Each chapter includes suggestions for further reading, and the book concludes with a comprehensive glossary of key terms. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, the volume will remain an ideal textbook for students of historical linguistics and a valuable reference for researchers and students in related areas such as syntax, comparative linguistics, language contact, and language acquisition.




Algorithms - ESA 2010


Book Description

Annotation This book constitutes the proceedings of the 18th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, held in Liverpool, UK in September 2010.




Research in Computational Molecular Biology


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology, RECOMB 2013, held in Beijing, China, in April 2013. The 32 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics including molecular sequence analysis; genes and regulatory elements; molecular evolution; gene expression; biological networks; sequencing and genotyping technologies; genomics; epigenomics; metagenomics; population, statistical genetics; systems biology; computational proteomics; computational structural biology; imaging; large-scale data management.




The Indo-European Controversy


Book Description

Over the past decade, a group of prolific and innovative evolutionary biologists has sought to reinvent historical linguistics through the use of phylogenetic and phylogeographical analysis, treating cognates like genes and conceptualizing the spread of languages in terms of the diffusion of viruses. Using these techniques, researchers claim to have located the origin of the Indo-European language family in Neolithic Anatolia, challenging the near-consensus view that it emerged in the grasslands north of the Black Sea thousands of years later. But despite its widespread celebration in the global media, this new approach fails to withstand scrutiny. As languages do not evolve like biological species and do not spread like viruses, the model produces incoherent results, contradicted by the empirical record at every turn. This book asserts that the origin and spread of languages must be examined primarily through the time-tested techniques of linguistic analysis, rather than those of evolutionary biology.




Analysing Older English


Book Description

An edited volume which addresses problems encountered in gathering and analysing data from early English.




The Aeolic Dialects of Ancient Greek


Book Description

The Aeolic dialects of Ancient Greek (Lesbian, Thessalian, and Boeotian) are characterised by a small bundle of commonly shared innovations, yet at the same time they exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity. While traditionally classified together in modern scholarship since the nineteenth century, in recent decades doubt has been cast on whether they form a coherent dialectal subgroup of Ancient Greek. In this monograph Matthew Scarborough outlines the history of problem of Aeolic classification from antiquity to the present day, collects and analyses the primary evidence for the linguistic innovations that unite and divide the group, and contributes an innovative new statistical methodology for evaluating highly contested genetic subgroupings in dialectology, ultimately arguing in support of the traditional classification.