Publications

Publication details [#30269]

Ramer, Alexis Manaster and Christopher Hitchcock. 1996. Glass houses: Greenberg, Ringe, and the mathematics of comparative linguistics. Anthropological Linguistics 38 (4) : 601–619.

Publication type

Article in journal

Publication language

English

Keywords

comparative | crosslinguistic perspective | linguistics

Place, Publisher

Indiana University

ISBN

0003-5483

Annotation

This paper deals with Ringe's charge of innumeracy towards Greenberg, and with his method of binary comparison between languages as opposed to Greenberg's method of multilateral comparison. It is argued that Ringe's charge rests on mathematical misunderstanding, but that his conclusions are not completely off the mark.