Article published in:
Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree modelEdited by Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François and Harald Hammarström
[Journal of Historical Linguistics 9:1] 2019
► pp. 9–69
Detecting non-tree-like signal using multiple tree topologies
Recent applications of phylogenetic methods to historical linguistics have been criticized for assuming a tree
structure in which ancestral languages differentiate and split up into daughter languages, while language evolution is inherently
non-tree-like (François 2014; Blench
2015: 32–33). This article attempts to contribute to this debate by discussing the use of the multiple topologies method
(Pagel & Meade 2006a) implemented in BayesPhylogenies (Pagel & Meade 2004). This method is applied to lexical datasets from four different
language families: Austronesian (Gray, Drummond & Greenhill 2009), Sinitic (Ben Hamed & Wang 2006), Indo-European (Bouckaert
et al. 2012), and Japonic (Lee & Hasegawa 2011). Evidence for multiple
topologies is found in all families except, surprisingly, Austronesian. It is suggested that reticulation may arise from a number
of processes, including dialect chain break-up, borrowing (both shortly after language splits and later on), incomplete lineage
sorting, and characteristics of lexical datasets. It is shown that the multiple topologies method is a useful tool to study the
dynamics of language evolution.
Keywords: Bayesian phylogenetic inference, Austronesian, Sinitic, Indo-European, Japonic, language contact, reticulation
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Reticulation in language and culture
- 3.Multiple tree topologies
- 4.Results
- 4.1Austronesian
- 4.2Indo-European
- 4.3Japonic
- 4.4Sinitic
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Note
-
References
Published online: 02 July 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.17009.ver
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.17009.ver
References
Algeo, John & Thomas Pyles
Atkinson, Quentin D. & Russell D. Gray
Beekes, Robert S. P.
Ben Hamed, Mahé & Feng Wang
Blench, Roger
2015 “New Mathematical Methods” in Linguistics Constitute the Greatest Intellectual Fraud in the Discipline Since Chomsky. Talk presented at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Bouchard-Côté, Alexandre, David Hall, Thomas L. Griffiths & Dan Klein
Bouckaert, Remco, Philippe Lemey, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Alexander V. Alekseyenko, Alexei J. Drummond, Russell D. Gray, Marc A. Suchard & Quentin D. Atkinson
Bowern, Claire & Quentin D. Atkinson
Bowern, Claire, Patience Epps, Russell D. Gray, Jane Hill, Keith Hunley, Patrick McConvell & Jason Zentz
Bowern, Claire & Bethwyn Evans
Bryant, David & Vincent Moulton
Chang, Will, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall & Andrew Garrett
Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia, Joshua Birchall, Sérgio Meira, Zachary O’Hagan & Lev Michael
2016 A Test of Coding Procedures for Lexical Data with Tupí-Guaraní and Chapacuran Languages. Proceedings of the Leiden Workshop on Capturing Phylogenetic Algorithms for Linguistics ed. by Christian Bentz, Gerhard Jäger & Igor Yanovich. Tübingen: University of Tübingen. Available at https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/68558
Collard, Mark, Stephen J. Shennan & Jamshid J. Tehrani
Drummond, Alexei J. & Remco R. Bouckaert
Dunn, Michael
Dunn, Michael, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson & Russell D. Gray
Dyen, Isidore, Joseph B. Kruskal & Paul Black
Edwards, Anthony W. F. & Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Eska, Joseph F. & Don Ringe
Forster, Peter & Colin Renfrew
François, Alexandre
Kalyan, Siva & Alexandre François
2018 Freeing the Comparative Method from the Tree Model: A Framework for Historical Glottometry. In Ritsuko Kikusawa & Lawrence Reid (eds.), Let’s talk about trees: Genetic Relationships of Languages and Their Phylogenic Representation (Senri Ethnological Studies, 98). Ōsaka: National Museum of Ethnology. 59–89.
Galucio, Ana Vilacy, Sérgio Meira, Joshua Birchall, Denny Moore, Nilson Gabas Júnior, Sebastian Drude, Luciana Storto, Gessiane Picançio & Carmen Reis Rodrigues
Geisler, Hans & Johann-Mattis List
2013 Do Languages Grow on Trees? The Tree Metaphor in the History of Linguistics. Classification and Evolution in Biology, Linguistics and the History of Science: Concepts – Methods – Visualization ed. by Heiner Fangerau, Hans Geisler, Thorsten Halling & William Martin, 111–124. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Gray, Russell D., David Bryant & Simon J. Greenhill
Gray, Russell D., Simon J. Greenhill & Robert M. Ross
Gray, Russell D. & Fiona M. Jordan
Gray, Russell D., Alexei J. Drummond & Simon J. Greenhill
Greenhill, Simon J., Thomas E. Currie & Russell D. Gray
Grollemund, Rebecca, Simon Branford, Koen Bostoen, Andrew Meade, Chris Venditti & Mark Pagel
Hammarström, Harald, Sebastian Bank, Robert Forkel & Martin Haspelmath
Heggarty, Paul
Heggarty, Paul, Warren Maguire & April McMahon
Holm, Hans J.
Hruschka, Daniel J., Simon Branford, Eric D. Smith, Jon Wilkins, Andrew Meade, Mark Pagel & Tanmoy Bhattacharya
Huelsenbeck, John P., Fredrik Ronquist, Rasmus Nielsen & Jonathan P. Bollback
Huson, Daniel H. & David Bryant
Huson, Daniel H. & Celine Scornavacca
Jacques, Guillaume & Johann-Mattis List
Jaeger, Gerhard & Søren Wichmann
2016 Inferring the World Tree of Languages From Word Lists. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EvoLang XI) ed. by Séan G. Roberts, Christine Cuskley, Luke McCrohon, Lluis Barceló-Coblijn, Olga Feher & Tessa Verhoef. Available at http://evolang.org/neworleans/papers/147.html
Kalyan, Siva & Alexandre François
2018 Freeing the Comparative Method from the tree model: A framework for Historical Glottometry. In Ritsuko Kikusawa & Lawrence Reid (eds), Let’s talk about trees: Genetic Relationships of Languages and Their Phylogenic Representation (Senri Ethnological Studies, 98). Ōsaka: National Museum of Ethnology. 59–89.
Kelly, Luke J. & Geoff K. Nicholls
Koonin, Eugene V., Kira S. Makarova & L. Aravind
Lee, Sean & Toshikazu Hasegawa
Levinson, Stephen C. & Russell D. Gray
List, Johann-Mattis
2017 Chinese Dialect Database. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Available at https://github.com/digling/cddb
List, Johann-Mattis, Shijulal Nelson-Sathi, Hans Geisler & William Martin
List, Johann-Mattis, Shijulal Nelson-Sathi, William Martin & Hans Geisler
List, Johann-Mattis, Jananan Sylvestre Pathmanathan, Philippe Lopez & Eric Bapteste
Macklin-Cordes, Jayden, & Erich Round
Matthews, Luke J., Jamie J. Tehrani, Fiona M. Jordan, Mark Collard & Charles L. Nunn
Meira, Sérgio, Joshua Birchall & Natalia Chousou-Polydouri
2015 A Character-Based Internal Classification of the Cariban Language Family. Paper presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Leiden, The Netherlands, September 2–5, 2015.
Morrison, David A.
Nakhleh, Luay, Don Ringe & Tandy Warnow
Nelson-Sathi, Shijulal, Johann-Mattis List, Hans Geisler, Heiner Fangerau, Russell D. Gray, William Martin & Tal Dagan
Nunn, Charles L., Christian Arnold, Luke Matthews & Monique Borgerhoff Mulder
Nunn, Charles L., Monique Borgerhoff Mulder & Sasha Langley
Pagel, Mark
Pagel, Mark, Quentin D. Atkinson & Andrew Meade
Pagel, Mark & Andrew Meade
2006a Detecting Conflicting Phylogenetic Signal: A Mixture Model Approach with Multiple Tree Topologies. Paper presented at the New Zealand Phylogenetics Meeting, Kaikoura, New Zealand, February 12–17, 2006. Available at https://zenodo.org/record/1117335#.WjeEzSOZPFR
N.d. Draft Manual for BayesPhylogenies
. Available at http://www.evolution.reading.ac.uk/BayesPhy.html
Pereltsvaig, Asya & Martin W. Lewis
Robbeets, Martine
Ronquist, Fredrik, Paul van der Mark & John P. Huelsenbeck
Swadesh, Morris
Tadmor, Uri
Tehrani, Jamshid & Mark Collard
Verkerk, Annemarie
Wang, Feng
2004 BCD: Basic Words of Chinese Dialects. Available at https://github.com/digling/cddb/tree/master/datasets/Wang2004a
Wang, William S.-Y. & James W. Minett
Wichmann, Søren, Robert S. Walker, Taraka Rama & Eric W. Holman
Widmer, Manuel, Sandra Auderset, Johanna Nichols, Paul Widmer & Balthasar Bickel
Willems, Matthieu, Etienne Lord, Louise Laforest, Gilbert Labelle, François-Joseph Lapointe, Anna Maria Di Sciullo & Vladimir Makarenkov
Xie, Wangang, Paul O. Lewis, Yu Fan, Lynn Kuo & Ming-Hui Chen
Zhou, Kevin & Claire Bowern
Cited by
Cited by 5 other publications
Guzmán Naranjo, Matías & Laura Becker
Leino, Unni, Kaj Syrjänen & Outi Vesakoski
Lukas, Dieter, Mary Towner & Monique Borgerhoff Mulder
Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. & Erich R. Round
Syrjänen, Kaj, Luke Maurits, Unni Leino, Terhi Honkola, Jadranka Rota & Outi Vesakoski
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 april 2022. 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.