Demystifying New Methods in Historical Linguistics
Edited by Erich Round
Special issue of Diachronica 41:3 (2024) v, 137 pp.
Erich Round
List of John Benjamins publications for which Erich Round plays a role.
Title
2024 Ancient languages and algorithms: Demystifying new methods in historical linguistics Demystifying New Methods in Historical Linguistics , Round, Erich (ed.), pp. 299–306 | Introduction
Historical linguistics has experienced an upsurge in methodological innovation. However, owing to the constraints of contemporary publication, these innovations often appear in print in a format which is technical, dense and less than fully accessible. Moreover, because these innovations are… read more
2021 Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics Diachronica 38:2, pp. 210–258 | Article
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… read more
2018 Areal pressure in grammatical evolution: An Indo-European case study Diachronica 35:1, pp. 1–34 | Article
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,… read more
2016 Fission, fusion and syncretism: Linguistic and environmental changes amongst the Tangkic people of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia Land and Language in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country, Verstraete, Jean-Christophe and Diane Hafner (eds.), pp. 105–136 | Article
A revised model of Tangkic linguistic and cultural history is developed based on a reanalysis of relationships between six Tangkic languages in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria and drawing on recent archaeological and environmental studies. Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of Tangkic basic vocabulary… read more
2014 Prestopping of nasals and laterals is only partly parallel Language Description Informed by Theory, Pensalfini, Rob, Myfany Turpin and Diana Guillemin (eds.), pp. 81–96 | Article
Pre-stopped nasals and laterals occur in several Australian languages, but why? Nasal pre-stopping likely enhances cues to place of articulation contrasts (Butcher 1999, 2006). Though recent work proposes that lateral pre-stopping does likewise (Keyser & Stevens 2006: footnote 7; Loakes et al.… read more