Linguistic phylogenies are commonly inferred from abstract cognate classifications that encode relationships among lexemes. Although widespread, this practice has well-recognized limitations: it discards the phylogenetic signal contained in segmental …
Traditional subgrouping has long been a cornerstone of historical linguistics. In recent decades, however, Bayesian methods have played an increasing role in linguistic phylogenetics, which has prompted debate about the relationship between the two …
Linguistic phylogenies are standardly inferred from lexical cognate relationships (e.g., Bouckaert et al. 2012, Chang et al. 2015, Sagart et al. 2019). Despite the prevalence of this practice, it suffers from well-known drawbacks. First, it …
Divergence-time estimation is one of the most important endeavors in historical linguistics. Its importance is matched only by its difficulty. As Bayesian methods of divergence-time estimation have become more common over the past two decades, a …
Grammaticalization is characterized by robust directional asymmetries (e.g., Kuteva et al. 2019). For instance, body-part nominals develop into spatial adpositions, minimizers develop into negation markers, and subject pronouns become agreement …
The comparative method depends crucially on the phylogenetic tree of the languages under comparison, but in many linguistic families, including Indo-European, the true tree is unknown. To circumvent this issue, frequency heuristics have been devised …
The last twenty or so years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the use of computational methods for inferring linguistic phylogenies. Although the results of this research have been controversial, the methods themselves are an undeniable boon for …