Phylogenetics

Diachronica at 40

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 …

Linguistic phylogenetics

Spring 2024

From phonology to phylogeny

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 …

A new approach to the diversification of ancient Greek

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 …

Fossilized birth-death models and the diversification of Latin

Divergence-time estimation in Indo-European

Correlated grammaticalization: The rise of articles in Indo-European

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 …

There’s no escaping phylogenetics

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 …

Linguistic phylogenetics

Winter 2022