Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity
Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh
1st Edition
Published on 26. September 2012
X, 182 pages
978-90-272-7335-2 (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).
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Soren Wichmann | Anthony P. Grant
Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity
Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh
Book
09/2012
John Benjamins Publishing Co
€90.10
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Content
- Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Table of contents
- Preface
- Swadesh's life and place in linguistics
- References
- A full-scale test of the language farming dispersal hypothesis
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Language families and data
- 2.1. Language families
- 2.2 Cardinal size
- 2.3 Geospatial size
- 2.4 Subsistence type
- 3. Explananda on language family sizes
- 4. The language farming dispersal hypothesis
- 4.1 Previous investigations of farming expansions
- 4.2 Definition of language farming dispersal hypothesis
- 5. Farming and cardinal size
- 6. Farming and east-west spreads
- 7. Discussion and conclusions
- References
- Appendix. The Language Families of the World: A Critical Synopsis
- Do languages originate and become extinct at constant rates?
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Theoretical prediction
- 3. Tests in published language trees
- 4. Tests in ASJP language trees
- 5. Properties of languages
- 6. Different regions and families
- 7. Discussion
- References
- Appendix 1. Description of LDND
- Appendix 2. Imbalance score (Iw) and number of bifurcating nodes (N) for trees constructed by each method for individual families
- Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary
- 1. Assessing degrees of lexical borrowability
- 2. The notion of basic vocabulary and the Swadesh 100 list
- 3. The Loanword Typology project
- 4. Differences among semantic word classes and semantic fields
- 4.1 Nouns vs. verbs (and adjectives)
- 4.2 Content words vs. function words
- 4.3 Differences among semantic fields
- 5. The most borrowing-resistant meanings
- 5.1 Meanings with the fewest (probable or clear) loanword counterparts
- 6. Representation
- 7. Analyzability
- 8. Age
- 9. The Leipzig-Jakarta list of basic vocabulary
- 10. The Leipzig-Jakarta list vs. the Swadesh 100 list and three other stability lists
- 11. Conclusions
- References
- Homelands of the world's language families
- 0. Introduction
- 1. The tool
- 2. The linguistic distance measure
- 3. The sample
- 4. Producing maps for homelands
- 5. Results
- 6. Discussion
- 6.1 Africa
- 6.2 Eurasia
- 6.3 New Guinea
- 6.4 North America
- 6.5 Middle and Northern South America
- 6.6 Central South America
- 7. Some generalizations
- 8. Conclusion
- References
- Appendix A. Maps for all language families sampled
- Appendix B. Languages and dialects represented in the study
- On using qualitative lexicostatistics to illuminate language history
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Constructing a cognacy grid
- 3. Vertical and horizontal lexicostatistics
- 4. A case study: The Caddoan languages
- 5. Further case studies
- 5.1 Cognacy, lexical diversity and uniqueness in two Uto-Aztecan cases
- 5.2 Subgrouping, borrowing and backmutation: the case of Latin and Romance
- 5.3 Borrowing, shared innovations and shared borrowings: lexicostatistics in Chamic and Malayic
- 6. Conclusions: Where qualitative lexicostatistics can take us
- References
- Beyond lexicostatistics
- 1. Swadesh's legacy: Clarifying the ambiguities
- 1.1 Glottochronology is dead - long live lexicostatistics?
- 1.2 'Glottochronology' vs. dating from language data
- 1.3 Glottochronology, or lexicostatistics? Dates, or measures of divergence?
- 1.3.1 What do glottochronological 'dates' really mean?
- 1.3.2 Glottochronology-free lexicostatistics
- 1.4 Measures - or evidence? - of relatedness
- 1.5 Cognacy judgements and loanwords
- 2. Getting more out of 'word lists': New research directions
- 2.1 Word lists without lexical semantics? Data in other levels of language
- 2.2 How many meanings make an 'optimal' list?
- 2.3 More stable vs. less stable meanings
- 2.4 At the shallow end: More meanings, or more resolution per meaning?
- 2.5 At the deep end: Fewer meanings, or more?
- 2.6 Screening out 'noise' - or throwing away data?
- 2.7 A method for disputed cases
- 2.8 An alternative approach: Keeping the less stable meanings
- 3. Conclusion
- References
- Phonetic comparison, varieties, and networks
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Swadesh's relevance to phonetic comparison
- 3. "Phonostatistics"
- 3.1 Levenshtein distances
- 3.2 Feature methods
- 3.3 Presence/absence of vowels/consonants
- 4. Small-scale comparison of different measures of phonetic distance
- 5. Extension of initial study
- 6. Assessment of results for the notion of phonetic distances
- 7. Conclusions
- References
- A stochastic local search approach to language tree reconstruction
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Violations of additivity
- 2.1 Four-points condition
- 2.2 Soft four-points condition
- 2.3 Calculation of the tree length from the distance matrix
- 3. A stochastic local search strategy
- 3.1 Background
- 3.2 Updating the tree topology
- 3.3 Definition of energy
- 3.4 Results on artificially generated datasets
- 4. The dataset used
- 5. Results
- 6. Discussion and Conclusions
- References
- Author index
- Index of languages and language groups
- Subject index
