Annemarie Verkerk (Universität des Saarlandes)

The evolutionary dynamics of language: universals, rates of change, and explanations

In the past decades, a shared quantitative framework for typology and historical linguistics has arisen: linguistic phylogenetics. For historical linguistics, phylogenetics can serve as a means to test hypotheses on family relations in a quantitative manner. In its wake, other quantitative tools have emerged, such as computer-assisted cognate detection (List et al. 2018). This talk is concerned with the use of phylogenetics for typology, which involves modeling how linguistic features change on the branches of a phylogeny (family tree). This allows us to test hypotheses about correlation (Dunn et al. 2011), the speed at which typological features change (rate of change, Greenhill et al. 2010) and inferences on what typological features may have looked like in the past (ancestral state estimation, Phillips & Bowern 2022).

In this talk, I will present three case-studies that speak to these three aspects of the evolutionary dynamics of language: correlations, rates of change, and ancestral states. The first case study is on universals, presenting evidence for a large set of Greenbergian implicational universals using phylogenetic methods. The second case study is on indigenous numeral systems, uncovering whether frequently attested base types are favoured evolutionarily through increased rates of change. The third case study is an assessment of reconstructing word order variation in different branches of Indo-European. Throughout, the topic of explaining feature distributions is central: how can we marry functional explanations, for example those rooted in processing efficiency or economy, with linguistic variation and change?

References

Dunn, M., Greenhill, S. J., Levinson, S. C., & Gray, R. D. (2011). Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature, 473(7345), 79–82. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09923

Greenhill, S. J., Atkinson, Q. D., Meade, A., & Gray, R. D. (2010). The shape and tempo of language evolution. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 277(1693), 2443–2450. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000241

List, J.-M., Walworth, M., Greenhill, S. J., Tresoldi, T., & Forkel, R. (2018). Sequence comparison in computational historical linguistics. Journal of Language Evolution, 3(2), 130–144. https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzy006

Phillips, J., & Bowern, C. (2022). Bayesian methods for ancestral state reconstruction in morphosyntax: Exploring the history of argument marking strategies in a large language family. Journal of Language Evolution, 7(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzac002