Linguistic phylogenies are typically inferred on the basis of lexical cognate relationships (e.g.,Bouckaert et al. 2012, Chang et al. 2015, Sagart et al. 2019). Despite the predominance of thispractice, it suffers from well-known drawbacks. First, it …
The diversification of the ancient Greek dialects remains one of the most recalcitrant problems in Greek linguistics. Debates persist over a number of fundamental issues, including the methodology of historical inference, the divergence times of the …
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 …
It has long been debated whether morphosyntactic change is teleological. Jespersen (1917:4), for instance, maintained that emphatic negative constructions are created in response to the weakening of older negative adverbs. Others have argued that …
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 …