Cover not available
Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 38:2 (2021) ► pp.210–258

Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics

ORCID logo | The University of Queensland
ORCID logo | Yale University
ORCID logo | The University of Queensland | University of Surrey | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data – in this instance, statistical phonotactics. We extract phonotactic data from 112 Pama-Nyungan vocabularies and apply tests for phylogenetic signal, quantifying the degree to which the data reflect phylogenetic history. We test three datasets: (1) binary variables recording the presence or absence of biphones (two-segment sequences) in a lexicon (2) frequencies of transitions between segments, and (3) frequencies of transitions between natural sound classes. Australian languages have been characterized as having a high degree of phonotactic homogeneity. Nevertheless, we detect phylogenetic signal in all datasets. Phylogenetic signal is greater in finer-grained frequency data than in binary data, and greatest in natural-class-based data. These results demonstrate the viability of employing a new source of readily extractable data in historical and comparative linguistics.

Keywords: historical signal, phylogenetic comparative methods, historical linguistics, phonology, comparative linguistics, linguistic phylogenetics, Pama-Nyungan, Australian languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Motivations
    • 1.2Phonotactics as a source of historical signal
  • 2.Phylogenetic signal
  • 3.Materials
    • 3.1Language sample
    • 3.2Wordlists
    • 3.3Reference phylogeny
  • 4.Phylogenetic signal in binary phonotactic data
    • 4.1Results for binary phonotactic data
    • 4.2Robustness checks
  • 5.Phylogenetic signal in continuous phonotactic data
    • 5.1Robustness checks
    • 5.2Forward transitions versus backward transitions
    • 5.3Normalization of character values
  • 6.Phylogenetic signal in natural-class-based characters
    • 6.1Natural-class-based characters versus biphones
  • 7.Discussion
    • 7.1Overall robustness
    • 7.2Limitations
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Author contribution statement
  • Supplementary materials
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 2 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20004.mac
References
Albright, Adam & Bruce Hayes
2003 Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: A computational/experimental study. Cognition 90(2). 119–161. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alpher, Barry J.
2004 Pama-Nyungan: Phonological reconstruction and status as a phylogenetic group. In Claire Bowern & Harold Koch (eds.), Australian languages: Classification and the comparative method (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 249), 93–126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin, Peter
1981 Proto-Kanyara and Proto-Mantharta historical phonology. Lingua 54(4). 295–333. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Brett
2014 Word structure in Australian languages. In Harold Koch & Rachel Nordlinger (eds.), The languages and linguistics of Australia: A comprehensive guide, 139–214. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Balisi, Mairin, Corinna Casey & Blaire Van Valkenburgh
2018 Dietary specialization is linked to reduced species durations in North American fossil canids. Royal Society Open Science 5(4). 171861. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Birchall, Joshua
2015 A comparison of verbal person marking across Tupian languages. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 10(2). 325–345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blasi, Damián E., Steven Moran, Scott R. Moisik, Paul Widmer, Dan Dediu & Balthasar Bickel
2019 Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration. Science 363(6432). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blomberg, Simon P. & Theodore Garland Jr.
2002 Tempo and mode in evolution: Phylogenetic inertia, adaptation and comparative methods. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 15(6). 899–910. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blomberg, Simon P., Theodore Garland Jr. & Anthony R. Ives
2003 Testing for phylogenetic signal in comparative data: Behavioral traits are more labile. Evolution 57(4). 717–745. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bouckaert, Remco R., Claire Bowern & Quentin D. Atkinson
2018 The origin and expansion of Pama-Nyungan languages across Australia. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2(4). 741–749. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bowern, Claire
2015 Pama-Nyungan phylogenetics and beyond [plenary address]. In Lorentz center workshop on phylogenetic methods in linguistics. Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 Chirila: Contemporary and historical resources for the Indigenous languages of Australia. Language Documentation and Conservation 101. [URL]
2017 Standard Average Australian? In Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT). Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018a Computational phylogenetics. Annual Review of Linguistics 4(1). 281–296. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018b Pama-Nyungan cognate judgements: 285 languages. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bowern, Claire & Quentin D. Atkinson
2012 Computational phylogenetics and the internal structure of Pama-Nyungan. Language 88(4). 817–845. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bowern, Claire, Patience Epps, Russell Gray, Jane Hill, Keith Hunley, Patrick McConvell & Jason Zentz
2011 Does lateral transmission obscure inheritance in hunter-gatherer languages? PLoS ONE 6(9). e25195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bowern, Claire & Harold Koch
(eds.) 2004 Australian languages: Classification and the comparative method (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 249). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Busby, Peter A.
1982 The distribution of phonemes in Australian Aboriginal languages. Pacific Linguistics. Series A. (60). 73–139.Google Scholar
Calude, Andreea S. & Annemarie Verkerk
2016 The typology and diachrony of higher numerals in Indo-European: A phylogenetic comparative study. Journal of Language Evolution 1(2). 91–108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Lyle
2004 Historical linguistics: An introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Capell, Arthur
1956 A new approach to Australian linguistics. Sydney: University of Sydney.Google Scholar
Chang, Will, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall & Andrew Garrett
2015 Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis. Language 91(1). 194–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chao, Yuen-Ren
1934 The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 4(4). 363–397.Google Scholar
Coleman, John & Janet Pierrehumbert
1997 Stochastic phonological grammars and acceptability. In Computational phonology: ACL special interest group in computational phonology, 49–56. Somerset, NJ: Association for Computational Linguistics. [URL] (8 March, 2018).
Crawford, Clifford J.
2009 Adaptation and transmission in Japanese loanword phonology. Cornell University thesis. [URL]
Cysouw, Michael & Jeff Good
2007 Towards a comprehensive languoid catalog. In Language catalogue meeting. Leipsig, Germany. [URL] (11 December, 2019).
Delsuc, Frédéric, Henner Brinkmann & Hervé Philippe
2005 Phylogenomics and the reconstruction of the tree of life. Nature Reviews Genetics 6(5). 361–375. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dixon, R. M. W.
1980 The languages of Australia (Cambridge Language Surveys). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dockum, Rikker
2018 Phylogeny in phonology: How Tai sound systems encode their past. In Annual meeting on phonology (AMP). New York: Linguistic Society of America. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dockum, Rikker & Claire Bowern
2019 Swadesh lists are not long enough: Drawing phonological generalizations from limited data. Language Documentation and Description 161. 35–54. [URL]
Dresher, B. Elan
2009 The contrastive hierarchy in phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dresher, B. Elan & Aditi Lahiri
2005 Main stress left in early Middle English. In Michael Fortescue, Jens E. Mogensen & Lene Schøsler (eds.), International conference on historical linguistics (ICHL), 76–85. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dunn, Michael, Angela Terrill, Ger Reesink, Robert A. Foley & Stephen C. Levinson
2005 Structural phylogenetics and the reconstruction of ancient language history. Science 309(5743). 2072–2075. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Durie, Mark & Malcolm Ross
1996 The comparative method reviewed: Regularity and irregularity in language change. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Eddington, David
2004 Spanish phonology and morphology: Experimental and quantitative perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ernestus, Mirjam T. C. & R. Harald Baayen
2003 Predicting the unpredictable: Interpreting neutralized segments in Dutch. Language 79(1). 5–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Felsenstein, Joseph
1985 Phylogenies and the comparative method. The American Naturalist 125(1). 1–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Freckleton, Robert P., Paul H. Harvey & Mark Pagel
2002 Phylogenetic analysis and comparative data: A test and review of evidence. The American Naturalist 160(6). 712–726. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Freckleton, Robert P. & Walter Jetz
2009 Space versus phylogeny: Disentangling phylogenetic and spatial signals in comparative data. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 276(1654). 21–30. DOI logo. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fritz, Susanne A. & Andy Purvis
2010 Selectivity in mammalian extinction risk and threat types: A new measure of phylogenetic signal strength in binary traits. Conservation Biology 24(4). 1042–1051. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garland, Theodore, Jr. & Ramón Díaz-Uriarte
1999 Polytomies and phylogenetically independent contrasts: Examination of the bounded degrees of freedom approach. Systematic Biology 48(3). 547–558. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gasser, Emily & Claire Bowern
2014 Revisiting phonotactic generalizations in Australian languages. In Annual meeting on phonology (AMP). University of Massachusetts, Amherst: Linguistic Society of America. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Good, Jeff & Michael Cysouw
2013 Languoid, doculect, and glossonym: Formalizing the notion ‘language’. Language Documentation and Conservation 71. 331–359. [URL]
Gordon, Matthew K.
2016 Phonological typology (Oxford Surveys in Phonology and Phonetics 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grafen, Alan
1989 The phylogenetic regression. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 326(1233). 119–157. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greenhill, Simon J., Thomas E. Currie & Russell D. Gray
2009 Does horizontal transmission invalidate cultural phylogenies? Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 276(1665). 2299–2306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greenhill, Simon J., Chieh-Hsi Wu, Xia Hua, Michael Dunn, Stephen C. Levinson & Russell D. Gray
2017 Evolutionary dynamics of language systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(42). E8822–E8829. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, Philip J.
1996 Phonetic constraints and markedness in the phonotactics of Australian Aboriginal languages. Toronto: University of Toronto thesis.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Zsuzsa C. Londe
2006 Stochastic phonological knowledge: The case of Hungarian vowel harmony. Phonology 23(1). 59–104. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hockett, Charles F.
1963 The problem of universals in language. In Joseph Greenberg (ed.), Universals of language, 1–29. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, Matthew C., Marília P. Gaiarsa & Daniel B. Stouffer
2018 Contemporary ecological interactions improve models of past trait evolution. Systematic Biology 67(5). 861–872. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyman, Larry M.
1970 The role of borrowing in the justification of phonological grammars. Studies in African Linguistics 1(1). 1–48. [URL]
2008 Universals in phonology. The Linguistic Review 25(1). 83–137. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard
2019 Computational historical linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics 45(3). 151–182. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kang, Yoonjung
2011 Loanword phonology. In Marc Van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume & Keren Rice (eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology, vol. IV1, 2258–2282. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kembel, Steven W., Peter D. Cowan, Mattew R. Helmus, William K. Cornwell, Helene Morlon, David D. Ackerly, Simon P. Blomberg & Campbell O. Webb
2010 Picante: R tools for integrating phylogenies and ecology. Bioinformatics 26(11). 1463–1464. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul
2018 Formal and empirical issues in phonological typology. In Larry M. Hyman & Frans Plank (eds.), Phonological typology, 54–106. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koch, Harold
2014 Historical relations among the Australian languages: Genetic classification and contact-based diffusion. In Harold Koch & Rachel Nordlinger (eds.), The languages and linguistics of Australia: A comprehensive guide, 23–90. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kolipakam, Vishnupriya, Fiona M. Jordan, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Remco R. Bouckaert, Russell D. Gray & Annemarie Verkerk
2018 A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family. Royal Society Open Science 5(3). 171504. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lass, Roger
1984 Vowel system universals and typology: Prologue to theory. Phonology Yearbook 11. 75–111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leff, Jonathan W., Richard D. Bardgett, Anna Wilkinson, Benjamin G. Jackson, William J. Pritchard, Jonathan R. Long, Simon Oakley, et al.
2018 Predicting the structure of soil communities from plant community taxonomy, phylogeny, and traits. The ISME Journal 121. 1794–1805. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
List, Johann-Mattis, Simon J. Greenhill & Russell D. Gray
2017 The potential of automatic word comparison for historical linguistics. PLoS ONE 12(1). e0170046. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
List, Johann-Mattis, Mary Walworth, Simon J. Greenhill, Tiago Tresoldi & Robert Forkel
2018 Sequence comparison in computational historical linguistics. Journal of Language Evolution 3(2). 130–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Losos, Jonathan B.
2008 Phylogenetic niche conservatism, phylogenetic signal and the relationship between phylogenetic relatedness and ecological similarity among species. Ecology Letters 11(10). 995–1003. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. & Erich R. Round
2015 High-definition phonotactics reflect linguistic pasts. In Johannes Wahle, Marisa Köllner, Harald Baayen, Gerhard Jäger & Tineke Baayen-Oudshoorn (eds.), Quantitative investigations in theoretical linguistics (QITL-6). Tübingen: University of Tübingen. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marin, Julie, S. Blair Hedges & Koichiro Tamura
2018 Undersampling genomes has biased time and rate estimates throughout the tree of life. Molecular Biology and Evolution 35(8). 2077–2084. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maurits, Luke & Thomas L. Griffiths
2014 Tracing the roots of syntax with Bayesian phylogenetics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(37). 13576–13581. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meillet, Antoine
1925 La méthode comparative en linguistique historique. Paris: Honoré Champion.Google Scholar
Moran, Steven & Michael Cysouw
2018 The Unicode cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles. Berlin: Language Science Press.Google Scholar
Moran, Steven, Eitan Grossman & Annemarie Verkerk
2020 Investigating diachronic trends in phonological inventories using BDPROTO. Language Resources and Evaluation. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moran, Steven & Annemarie Verkerk
2018 Differential rates of change in consonant and vowel systems. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, Luke McCrohon, A. Ravignani & T. Verhoef (eds.), The evolution of language (EVOLANGXII). NCU Press. DOI logo. [URL]
Münkemüller, Tamara, Sébastien Lavergne, Bruno Bzeznik, Stéphane Dray, Thibaut Jombart, Katja Schiffers & Wilfried Thuiller
2012 How to measure and test phylogenetic signal. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 3(4). 743–756. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nash, David, Patrick McConvell, Arthur Capell, Ken Hale, Peter Sutton, Deborah Bird Rose & Jim Wafer
1988 Mudburra wordlist. Word list. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Australian Indigenous Languages Collection, ms. [URL]
Nichols, Johanna
1997 Sprung from two common sources: Sahul as a linguistic area. In Patrick McConvell & Nicholas Evans (eds.), Archaeology and linguistics: Aboriginal Australia in global perspective. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nunn, Charles L.
2011 The comparative approach in evolutionary anthropology and biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Grady, Geoffrey N., Charles F. Voegelin & Florence M. Voegelin
1966 Languages of the world: Indo-Pacific fascicle six. Anthropological Linguistics 1–197.Google Scholar
Orme, David, Rob Freckleton, Gavin Thomas, Thomas Petzoldt, Susanne Fritz, Nick Isaac & Will Pearse
2013 caper: Comparative analyses of phylogenetics and evolution in R. [URL]
Rama, Taraka, Johann-Mattis List, Johannes Wahle & Gerhard Jäger
2018 Are automatic methods for cognate detection good enough for phylogenetic reconstruction in historical linguistics? In North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL): Human language technologies, volume 2 (short papers), 393–400. New Orleans: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
R Core Team
2017 R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL]
Revell, Liam J., Luke J. Harmon, David C. Collar & Todd Oakley
2008 Phylogenetic signal, evolutionary process, and rate. Systematic Biology 57(4). 591–601. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rexová, Kateřina, Yvonne Bastin & Daniel Frynta
2006 Cladistic analysis of Bantu languages: A new tree based on combined lexical and grammatical data. Naturwissenschaften 93(4). 189–194. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Round, Erich R.
2017a Matthew K. Gordon: Phonological typology [book review]. Folia Linguistica 51(3). 745–755. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017b The AusPhon-Lexicon project: 2 million normalized segments across 300 Australian languages. In Poznań linguistic meeting. Poznań, Poland. [URL]
2019a Phonemic inventories of Australia [database of 392 languages]. In Steven Moran & Daniel McCloy (eds.), PHOIBLE 2.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.Google Scholar
2019b Australian phonemic inventories contributed to PHOIBLE 2.0: Essential explanatory notes. Zenodo. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2021a Segment inventories in Australian languages. In Claire Bowern (ed.), Oxford handbook of Australian languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2021b Phonotactics in Australian languages. In Claire Bowern (ed.), Oxford handbook of Australian languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sallan, Lauren Cole & Matt Friedman
2012 Heads or tails: Staged diversification in vertebrate evolutionary radiations. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 279(1735). 2025–2032. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, Wilhelm
1919 Die Gliederung australischen Sprachen: Geographische, bibliographische, linguistische Grundzüge der Erforschung der australischen Sprachen. Vienna: Druck und Verlag der Mechitharisten-Buchdruckerei.Google Scholar
Silverman, Daniel
1992 Multiple scansions in loanword phonology: Evidence from Cantonese. Phonology 9(2). 289–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sookias, Roland B., Samuel Passmore & Quentin D. Atkinson
2018 Deep cultural ancestry and human development indicators across nation states. Royal Society Open Science 5(4). 171411. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steiner, Lydia, Michael Cysouw & Peter Stadler
2011 A pipeline for computational historical linguistics. Language Dynamics and Change 1(1). 89–127. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Uyeda, Josef C., Rosana Zenil-Ferguson, Matthew W. Pennell & Nicholas Matzke
2018 Rethinking phylogenetic comparative methods. Systematic Biology 67(6). 1091–1109. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van der Hulst, Harry
2017 Phonological typology. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic typology, 39–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verkerk, Annemarie
2014 Diachronic change in Indo-European motion event encoding. Journal of Historical Linguistics 4(1). 40–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 Phylogenetic comparative methods for typologists (focusing on families and regions: A plea for using phylogenetic comparative methods in linguistic typology). In Quantitative analysis in typology: The logic of choice among methods (workshop at the 12th conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology). Canberra, Australia: Australian National University.Google Scholar
Villemereuil, Pierre de & Shinichi Nakagawa
2014 General quantitative genetic methods for comparative biology. In László Z. Garamszegi (ed.), Modern phylogenetic comparative methods and their application in evolutionary biology: Concepts and practice, 287–303. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Voegelin, Florence M., Stephen A. Wurm, Geoffrey O’Grady, Tokuichiro Matsuda & Charles F. Voegelin
1963 Obtaining an index of phonological differentiation from the construction of non-existent minimax systems. International Journal of American Linguistics 29(1). 4–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walker, Robert S. & Lincoln A. Ribeiro
2011 Bayesian phylogeography of the Arawak expansion in lowland South America. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 278(1718). 2562–2567. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Webb, Campbell O., David D. Ackerly, Mark A. McPeek & Michael J. Donoghue
2002 Phylogenies and community ecology. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 33(1). 475–505. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weiss, Michael
2014 The comparative method. In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds.), The Routledge handbook of historical linguistics (Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics), 127–145. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Widmer, Manuel, Sandra Auderset, Johanna Nichols, Paul Widmer & Balthasar Bickel
2017 NP recursion over time: Evidence from Indo-European. Language 93(4). 799–826. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wortley, Alexandra H., Paula J. Rudall, David J. Harris, Robert W. Scotland & Peter Linder
2005 How much data are needed to resolve a difficult phylogeny? Case study in lamiales. Systematic Biology 54(5). 697–709. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wurm, Stephen A.
1963 Aboriginal languages: The present state of knowledge. In Helen Shiels (ed.), Australian Aboriginal studies: A symposium of papers presented at the 1961 research conference, 127–148. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1972 Languages of Australia and Tasmania. The Hague: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zheng, Li, Anthony R. Ives, Theodore Garland Jr., Bret R. Larget, Yang Yu & Kunfang Cao
2009 New multivariate tests for phylogenetic signal and trait correlations applied to ecophysiological phenotypes of nine manglietia species. Functional Ecology 23(6). 1059–1069. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhou, Kevin & Claire Bowern
2015 Quantifying uncertainty in the phylogenetics of Australian numeral systems. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282(1815). 20151278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zuraw, Kie R.
2000 Patterned exceptions in phonology. Los Angeles: University of California dissertation.Google Scholar