Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2002.00527v2
• Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2020 04:50:02 GMT
• Title: Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics
• Authors: Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes, Claire Bowern and Erich R. Round
• Abstract summary: We show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data. We extract phonotactic data from 111 Pama-Nyungan and apply tests for phylogenetic signal. Results demonstrate the viability of employing a new source of readily extractable data in historical and comparative linguistics.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data--in this instance, statistical phonotactics. We extract phonotactic data from 111 Pama-Nyungan vocabularies and apply tests for phylogenetic signal, quantifying the degree to which the data reflect phylogenetic history. We test three datasets: (1) binary variables recording the presence or absence of biphones (two-segment sequences) in a lexicon (2) frequencies of transitions between segments, and (3) frequencies of transitions between natural sound classes. Australian languages have been characterized as having a high degree of phonotactic homogeneity. Nevertheless, we detect phylogenetic signal in all datasets. Phylogenetic signal is greater in finer-grained frequency data than in binary data, and greatest in natural-class-based data. These results demonstrate the viability of employing a new source of readily extractable data in historical and comparative linguistics.

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