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Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model
Edited 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

| University of Reading | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

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: 2 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.17009.ver
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