Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity

Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh
Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-90-272-0265-9
Verlag: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Buch, Englisch, Band 46, 182 Seiten, Format (B × H): 164 mm x 245 mm, Gewicht: 470 g

Reihe: Benjamins Current Topics

Quantitative methods in linguistics, which the protean American structuralist linguist Morris Swadesh introduced in the 1950s, have become increasingly popular and have opened the world of languages to interdisciplinary approaches. The papers collected here are the work not only of descriptive and historical linguists, but also statisticians, physicists and computer scientists. They demonstrate the application of quantitative methods to the elucidation of linguistic prehistory on an unprecedented world-wide scale, providing cutting-edge insights into issues of the linguistic correlates of subsistence strategies, rates of birth and extinction of languages, lexical borrowability, the identification of language family homelands, the assessment of genealogical relationships, and the development of new phylogenetic methods appropriate for linguistic data.
Originally published in Diachronica 27:2 (2010).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wichmann, Søren

Grant, Anthony P.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Phonetik, Phonologie, Prosodie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Swadesh’s life and place in linguistics
Anthony P. Grant

A full-scale test of the language farming dispersal hypothesis
Harald Hammarström

Do languages originate and become extinct at constant rates?
Eric W. Holman

Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary
Uri Tadmor, Martin Haspelmath and Bradley Taylor

Homelands of the world’s language families: A quantitative approach
Søren Wichmann, André Müller and Viveka Velupillai

On using qualitative lexicostatistics to illuminate language history: Some techniques and case studies
Anthony P. Grant

Beyond lexicostatistics: How to get more out of ‘word list’ comparisons
Paul Heggarty

Phonetic comparison, varieties, and networks: Swadesh’s influence lives on here too
Jennifer Sullivan and April McMahon

A stochastic local search approach to language tree reconstruction
Francesca Tria, Emanuele Caglioti, Vittorio Loreto and Andrea Pagnani

Index

Author index

Index of languages and language groups

Subject index