Linguistic Diversification

Phylogenetic inference from cognate word forms

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 …

An event-based model for linguistic phylogenetics

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 in Indo-European: The case of Latin

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 …

Indo-European phylogenetics with R

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 …