This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 Indo-European languages. We partition types of change (i.e., gain or loss) for each variant according to whether they bring about a simplification in morphosyntactic patterns that must be learned, whether they are neutral (i.e., neither simplifying nor introducing complexity) or whether they introduce a more complex pattern. We find that changes which introduce complexity show significantly less areal signal (according to a metric we devise) than changes which simplify and neutral changes, but we find no significant differences between the latter two groups. This result is compatible with a scenario where certain types of parallel change are more likely to be mediated by advergence and contact between proximate speech communities, while other developments are due purely to drift and are largely independent of intercultural contact.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.2007. Grammars in contact: A cross-linguistic perspective. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (eds.), Grammars in contact, 1–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baayen, R. Harald. 2008. Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown & Greville Corbett (eds.). 2015. Understanding and measuring morphological complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beaulieu, Jeremy M. & Brian C. O’Meara. 2014. Hidden Markov models for studying the evolution of binary morphological characters. In László Zsolt Garamszegi (ed.), Modern phylogenetic comparative methods and their application in evolutionary biology: Concepts and practice, 395–408. Heidelberg: Springer.
Bentz, Christian & Bodo Winter. 2013. Languages with more second language learners tend to lose nominal case. Language Dynamics and Change 3(1). 1–27.
Bickel, Balthasar. 2011. Statistical modeling of language universals. Linguistic Typology 151. 401–413.
Bollback, Jonathan P.2006. SIMMAP: Stochastic character mapping of discrete traits on phylogenies. BMC Bioinformatics 71. 88.
Botero, Carlos A., Beth Gardner, Kathryn R. Kirby, Joseph Bulbulia, Michael C. Gavin & Russell D. Gray. 2014. The ecology of religious beliefs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(47). 16784–16789.
Braunmüller, Kurt. 1984. Morphologische Undurchsichtigkeit – ein Charakteristikum kleiner Sprachen. Kopenhagener Beiträge zur Germanistischen Linguistik 221. 48–68.
Chang, William, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall & Andrew Garrett. 2015. Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European Steppe Hypothesis. Language 91(1). 194–244.
Clark, Philip J. & Francis C. Evans. 1954. Distance to nearest neighbor as a measure of spatial relationships in populations. Ecology 35(4). 445–453.
Darlington, Richard B. & Andrew F. Hayes. 2017. Regression analysis and linear models: Concepts, applications, and implementation. London: Guilford Press.
Daumé, Hal. 2009. Non-parametric Bayesian areal linguistics. In Human language technologies: The 2009 annual conference of the North American chapter of the ACL, 593–601. Boulder, CO: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Dediu, Dan. 2010. A Bayesian phylogenetic approach to estimating the stability of linguistic features and the genetic biasing of tone. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 278(1704). 474–479.
Delbrück, Berthold. 1900. Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen, vol. 31. Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner.
Drummond, A. J., M. A. Suchard, D. Xie & A. Rambaut. 2012. Bayesian phylogenetics with BEAUti and the BEAST 1.7. Molecular Biology and Evolution 29(8). 1969–1973.
Dunn, Michael. 2015. Language phylogenies. In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds.), The Routledge handbook of historical linguistics, 190–211. Oxford: Routledge.
Dunn, Michael, Tonya Kim Dewey, Carlee Arnett, Thórhallur Eythórsson & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2017. Dative sickness: A phylogenetic analysis of argument structure evolution in Germanic. Language 93(1). e1–e22.
Dunn, Michael, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson & Russell D. Gray. 2011. Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature 473(7345). 79–82.
Dunn, Michael, Stephen C. Levinson, Eva Lindström, Ger Reesink & Angela Terrill. 2008. Structural phylogeny in historical linguistics: Methodological explorations applied in Island Melanesia. Language 84(4). 710–759.
Fortson, Benjamin W.2015. Indo-European: Methods and problems. In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds.), The Routledge handbook of historical linguistics, 645–656. Oxford: Routledge.
Friedrich, Paul. 1975. Proto-Indo-European syntax: The order of meaningful elements (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph 1). Butte, MT: Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology.
Gamkrelidze, Tamaz & Vyacheslav I. Ivanov. 1995. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans (translated by Johanna Nichols). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Garrett, Andrew. 2006. Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology. In Peter Forster & Colin Renfrew (eds.), Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, 139–151. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Gelman, Andrew & Donald B. Rubin. 1992. Inference from iterative simulation using multiple sequences. Statistical Science 71. 457–511.
Graham, Christopher. 2016. Geographical correlates of rare word orders: A computational approach to quantitative typology and language contact. University of California, Davis dissertation.
Gumperz, John J. & Robert Wilson. 1971. Convergence and creolization. In Dell Hymes (ed.), Pidginization and creolization of languages, 151–168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin, Matthew Dryer, David Gil & Bernard Comrie. 2005. The world atlas of language structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haug, Dag. 2015. Treebanks in historical linguistic research. In Carlotta Viti (ed.), Perspectives on historical syntax, 187–202. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Haynie, Hannah, Claire Bowern & Hannah LaPalombara. 2014. Sound symbolism in the languages of Australia. PloS One 9(4). e92852.
Hock, Hans Henrich. 1996 [1993]. Subversion or convergence? The issue of pre-Vedic retroflexion reexamined. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 23(2). 73–115.
Hoenigswald, Henry M.1960. Language change and linguistic reconstruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hoenigswald, Henry M.1966. Criteria for the subgrouping of languages. In Henrik Birnbaum & Jaan Puhvel (eds.), Ancient Indo-European dialects, 1–12. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Jäger, Gerhard & Johann-Mattis List. Forthcoming. Using ancestral state reconstruction methods for onomasiological reconstruction in multilingual word lists. Language Dynamics and Change 81.
Kroch, Anthony, Ann Taylor & Donald Ringe. 2000. The Middle English verb-second constraint: A case study in language contact and language change. In Susan C. Herring, Pieter Th. van Reenen & Lene Schøsler (eds.), Textual parameters in older languages, 353–392. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Liggett, Thomas M.2010. Continuous time Markov processes: An introduction, vol. 1131 Graduate Studies in Mathematics. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society.
List, Johann-Mattis, Shijulal Nelson-Sathi, William Martin & Hans Geisler. 2014. Using phy-logenetic networks to model Chinese dialect history. In Søren Wichmann & Jeff Good (eds.), Quantifying language dynamics, 125–154. Leiden: Brill.
Lupyan, Gary & Rick Dale. 2010. Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PLoS One 51. 1–10.
Martinet, André. 1975. Évolution des langues et reconstruction. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Meid, Wolfgang. 1975. Probleme der räumlichen und zeitlichen Gliederung des Indogermanischen. In Helmut Rix (ed.), Flexion und Wortbildung, 204–19. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
Meillet, Antoine. 1925. La méthode comparative en linguistique historique. Oslo: H. Aschehoug & Co.
Miestamo, Matti, Kaius Sinnemäki & Fred Karlsson (eds.). 2008. Complexity in linguistic theory, language learning and language change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nakhleh, Luay, Donald Ringe & Tandy Warnow. 2005. Perfect phylogenetic networks: A new methodology for reconstructing the evolutionary history of natural languages. Language 81(2). 382–420.
Nichols, Johanna. 1986. Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. Language 621. 56–119.
Nichols, Johanna. 1998. The Eurasian spread zone and the Indo-European dispersal. In Roger M. Blench & Matthew Spriggs (eds.), Archaeology and language II: Correlating archaeological and linguistic hypotheses, 220–266. London: Routledge.
Nichols, Johanna. 2003. Diversity and stability in languages. In Brian D. Joseph & Richard D. Janda (eds.), The Oxford handbook of historical linguistics, 283–310. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nichols, Johanna. 2009. Linguistic complexity: A comprehensive definition and survey. In Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil & Peter Trudgill (eds.), Language complexity as an evolving variable, 110–125. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nichols, Johanna & Tandy Warnow. 2008. Tutorial on computational linguistic phylogeny. Language and Linguistics Compass 2(5). 760–820.
Paradis, Emmanuel. 2014. Simulation of phylogenetic data. In László Zsolt Garamszegi (ed.), Modern phylogenetic comparative methods and their application in evolutionary biology: Concepts and practice, 335–350. Heidelberg: Springer.
Renfrew, Colin. 2000. At the edge of knowability: Towards a prehistory of languages. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10(1). 7–34.
Rosenthal, Jeffrey S.2011. Optimal proposal distributions and adaptive MCMC. In Steve Brooks, Andrew Gelman, Galin L. Jones & Xiao-Li Meng (eds.), Handbook of Markov chain Monte Carlo, 93–112. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC.
Ross, Malcolm. 2013. Diagnosing contact processes from their outcomes: The importance of life stages. Journal of Language Contact 6(1). 5–47.
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Schaller, Helmut Wilhelm. 1975. Die Balkansprachen: eine Einführung in die Balkanphilologie. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Swadesh, Morris. 1952. Lexicostatistic dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 961. 452–463.
Swadesh, Morris. 1955. Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating. International Journal of American Linguistics 211. 121–137.
Trudgill, Peter. 1974. Linguistic change and diffusion: Description and explanation in sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language in Society 3(2). 215–246.
Trudgill, Peter. 2001. Contact and simplification: Historical baggage and directionality in linguistic change. Linguistic Typology 51. 371–374.
Vennemann, Theo. 1994. Linguistic reconstruction in the context of European prehistory. Transactions of the Philological Society 921. 215–284.
Viti, Carlotta. 2010. The information structure of OVS in Vedic. In Gisella Ferraresi & Rosemarie Lühr (eds.), Diachronic studies on information structure: Language acquisition and change, 37–62. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Yang, Ziheng. 2014. Molecular evolution: A statistical approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Yanovich, Igor. 2016. Genetic drift explains Sapir’s “drift” in semantic change. In Seán G. Roberts, Christine Cuskley, Luke McCrohon, Lluis Barceló-Coblijn, Olga Fehér & Tessa Verhoef (eds.), The evolution of language: Proceedings of the 11th international conference (EVOLANGX11), Online at [URL].
Cited by (16)
Cited by 16 other publications
Bowern, Claire, Margaret Thomas, Andrew Garrett, James Kirby, Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales, Tamisha L. Tan, Terttu Nevalainen, Patience Epps & Don Daniels
2022. Challenges of sampling and how phylogenetic comparative methods help: with a case study of the Pama-Nyungan laminal contrast. Linguistic Typology 26:3 ► pp. 533 ff.
Hoffmann, Konstantin, Remco Bouckaert, Simon J Greenhill & Denise Kühnert
2021. Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of linguistic data using BEAST. Journal of Language Evolution 6:2 ► pp. 119 ff.
List, Johann-Mattis & Robert Forkel
2021. Automated identification of borrowings in multilingual wordlists. Open Research Europe 1 ► pp. 79 ff.
List, Johann-Mattis & Robert Forkel
2021. Automated identification of borrowings in multilingual wordlists. Open Research Europe 1 ► pp. 79 ff.
List, Johann-Mattis & Robert Forkel
2022. Automated identification of borrowings in multilingual wordlists. Open Research Europe 1 ► pp. 79 ff.
Wichmann, Søren & Taraka Rama
2021. Testing methods of linguistic homeland detection using synthetic data. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376:1824
List, Johann‐Mattis
2019. Automated methods for the investigation of language contact, with a focus on lexical borrowing. Language and Linguistics Compass 13:10
Carling, Gerd, Filip Larsson, Chundra A. Cathcart, Niklas Johansson, Arthur Holmer, Erich Round, Rob Verhoeven & Muhammad Zubair Asghar
2018. Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics (DiACL)—A database for ancient language typology. PLOS ONE 13:10 ► pp. e0205313 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 november 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.