This paper reports the results of an attempt to recover the ®rst-order subgrouping of the Indo-European family using a new computational method devised by the authors and based on à perfect phylogeny' algorithm. The methodology is also brie¯y described, and points of theory and methodology are addressed in connection with the experiment whose results are here reported.
In this paper we extend the Ringe-Warnow model of language evolution to include the case where languages remain in contact, trading linguistic material, as they evolve. We describe our analysis of an Indo-European dataset (originally assembled by Ringe and Taylor) based on this new model. Our study shows that this new model fits the IE family well and suggests that the early evolution of IE involved only limited contact between distinct lineages. Furthermore, the candidate histories we obtain appear to be consistent with archaeological findings, which suggests that this method may be of practical use.
We describe the reconstruction of a phylogeny for a set of taxa, with a character-based cladistics approach, in a declarative knowledge representation formalism, and show how to use computational methods of answer set programming to generate conjectures about the evolution of the given taxa. We have applied this computational method in two domains: historical analysis of languages and historical analysis of parasite-host systems. In particular, using this method, we have computed some plausible phylogenies for Chinese dialects, for Indo-European language groups, and for Alcataenia species. Some of these plausible phylogenies are different from the ones computed by other software. Using this method, we can easily describe domain-specific information (e.g., temporal and geographical constraints), and thus prevent the reconstruction of some phylogenies that are not plausible.
This paper reports the discovery of a syntactic dialect difference between northern and southern Middle English in the grammatical implementation of the so-called "verb-second" constraint and argues that this difference is most likely a linguistic contact effect of the Viking invasions of northern and eastern England in the eighth and ninth centuries. In the South, the Middle English V2 constraint behaves as it had in Old English; that is, as a variant of the IP-V2 type, the type found in modern Yiddish and Icelandic. In the North, however, the constraint is of the CP-V2 type, as found in modern Mainland Scandinavian and in German or Dutch. It is argued that the northern form of V2 arises as a consequence of the collapse of agreement inflection in northern Middle English, which leads to a loss of V-to-I movement, just as happened in mainland Scandinavian when agreement inflection was lost there. Once, V-to-I movement is lost, IP can no longer host the topic-verb configuration that defines the verb-second phenomenon. The collapse of agreement is further argued to result from imperfect second language learning by the Scandinavian invaders, who formed a large enough proportion of the population of the North to impose substratum effects on the northern dialect. Investigation of the available documentary evidence is shown to support dating both the collapse of endings and the appearance of CP-V2 word order to the period of the Viking invasions. It is suggested that the loss of V2 word order in English, which has made it the only Germanic language that does not respect the constraint, may have resulted from the extensive contact between northern and southern speakers that lead to the mixture of northern and southern features that characterize the language of the Midlands (and London) in the late Middle English period. 1. Introduction. As has long been known, the northern and southern dialects 1 of Middle English differed considerably in their phonology, morphology and lexicon. Many of these differences have been traced to the linguistic influence in the North of the eighth and ninth century Viking invaders who first plundered, then conquered and settled in, large territories in Northumbria, Lincolnshire and East Anglia. In this paper, we will add to the list of known differences between the dialects a † Some of the results reported in this paper were presented earlier at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics at UCLA in August 1993 and appeared in a paper published in the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (Kroch and Taylor 1994).
Archaeological evidence and linguistic evidence converge in support of an origin of Indo-European languages on the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 4,000 years BCE. The evidence is so strong that arguments in support of other hypotheses should be reexamined.
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