相关论文: Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics

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…

Computational phylogenetics has become an established tool in historical linguistics, with many language families now analyzed using likelihood-based inference. However, standard approaches rely on expert-annotated cognate sets, which are…

Function Load (FL) quantifies the contributions by phonological contrasts to distinctions made across the lexicon. Previous research has linked particularly low values of FL to sound change. Here we broaden the scope of enquiry into FL, to…

In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not…

In this article we propose a novel method to estimate the frequency distribution of linguistic variables while controlling for statistical non-independence due to shared ancestry. Unlike previous approaches, our technique uses all available…

Phylogenetic comparative methods explore the relationships between quantitative traits adjusting for shared evolutionary history. This adjustment often occurs through a Brownian diffusion process along the branches of the phylogeny that…

We probe the layers in multilingual BERT (mBERT) for phylogenetic and geographic language signals across 100 languages and compute language distances based on the mBERT representations. We 1) employ the language distances to infer and…

To fully exploit the potential of computational phylogenetic methods for cognate data one needs to leverage specific (complex) models an machine learning-based techniques. However, both approaches require datasets that are substantially…

Phylogenetic analyses of gene expression have great potential for addressing a wide range of questions. These analyses will, for example, identify genes that have evolutionary shifts in expression that are correlated with evolutionary…

We describe a set of new methods to partially automate linguistic phylogenetic inference given (1) cognate sets with their respective protoforms and sound laws, (2) a mapping from phones to their articulatory features and (3) a typological…

Phylogenetic trees elucidate evolutionary relationships among species, but phylogenetic inference remains challenging due to the complexity of combining continuous (branch lengths) and discrete parameters (tree topology). Traditional Markov…

The statistical over-representation of phonological features in the basic vocabulary of languages is often interpreted as reflecting potentially universal sound symbolic patterns. However, most of those results have not been tested…

As researchers collect increasingly large molecular data sets to reconstruct the Tree of Life, the heterogeneity of signals in the genomes of diverse organisms poses challenges for traditional phylogenetic analysis. A class of phylogenetic…

Phylogenetic species trees typically represent the speciation history as a bifurcating tree. Speciation events that simultaneously create more than two descendants, thereby creating polytomies in the phylogeny, are possible. Moreover, the…

In this paper we identify several serious problems that arise in the use of syntactic data from the SSWL database for the purpose of computational phylogenetic reconstruction. We show that the most naive approach fails to produce reliable…

I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying…

Sound correspondence patterns form the basis of cognate detection and phonological reconstruction in historical language comparison. Methods for the automatic inference of correspondence patterns from phonetically aligned cognate sets have…

Historical linguistics aims at inferring the most likely language phylogenetic tree starting from information concerning the evolutionary relatedness of languages. The available information are typically lists of homologous (lexical,…

We propose an interactive approach to language learning that utilizes linguistic acceptability judgments from an informant (a competent language user) to learn a grammar. Given a grammar formalism and a framework for synthesizing data, our…

In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…