Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity
Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh
Published on 26. September 2012
Book
Hardback
182 pages
978-90-272-0265-9 (ISBN)
Description
Quantitative methods in linguistics, which the protean American structuralist linguist Morris Swadesh introduced in the 1950s, have become increasingly popular and have opened the world of languages to interdisciplinary approaches. The papers collected here are the work not only of descriptive and historical linguists, but also statisticians, physicists and computer scientists. They demonstrate the application of quantitative methods to the elucidation of linguistic prehistory on an unprecedented world-wide scale, providing cutting-edge insights into issues of the linguistic correlates of subsistence strategies, rates of birth and extinction of languages, lexical borrowability, the identification of language family homelands, the assessment of genealogical relationships, and the development of new phylogenetic methods appropriate for linguistic data.
Originally published in Diachronica 27:2 (2010).
Originally published in Diachronica 27:2 (2010).
Reviews / Votes
This collection is an important contribution to quantitative methods to linguistic diversity. -- Steve Moran, University of Zurich and University of Marburg, in Studies in Language Vol. 38:1 (2014)More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Amsterdam
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
+ index
Dimensions
Height: 245 mm
Width: 164 mm
Weight
470 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-272-0265-9 (9789027202659)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Søren Wichmann | Anthony P. Grant
Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity
Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh
E-Book
09/2012
1st Edition
John Benjamins Publishing Company
€105.99
Available for download
Persons
Content
1. Articles / Aufsatze; 2. Swadesh's life and place in linguistics (by Grant, Anthony P.); 3. A full-scale test of the language farming dispersal hypothesis (by Hammarstrom, Harald); 4. Do languages originate and become extinct at constant rates? (by Holman, Eric W.); 5. Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary (by Tadmor, Uri); 6. Homelands of the world's language families: A quantitative approach (by Wichmann, Soren); 7. On using qualitative lexicostatistics to illuminate language history: Some techniques and case studies (by Grant, Anthony P.); 8. Beyond lexicostatistics: How to get more out of 'word list' comparisons (by Heggarty, Paul); 9. Phonetic comparison, varieties, and networks: Swadesh's influence lives on here too (by Sullivan, Jennifer); 10. A stochastic local search approach to language tree reconstruction (by Tria, Francesca); 11. Index; 12. Author index; 13. Index of languages and language groups; 14. Subject index