Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics
| Autor: | Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L., Bowern, Claire, Round, Erich R. |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: | |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1075/dia.20004.mac |
| Popis: | 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 111 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. Comment: Main text: 32 pages, 17 figures, 1 table. Supplementary Information: 17 pages, 1 figure. Code and data available at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3936353. This article is in review but not yet accepted for publication in a journal |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
| Externí odkaz: |
|