Romance

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 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 …

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 …