Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics

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 112 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.

Combined lexical and phonotactic data resolves uncertainties in the evolutionary diversification of the Japonic language family

“…However, the fairly shallow timedepth of Japonic entails limited lexical differentiation (Hattori, 1973), which complicates unravelling the relations between closely-related lects. To address this, we supplemented the lexical data with phonotactic data, which has been explored as a source phylogenetic signal recently (Dockum, 2017;Macklin-Cordes, Bowern and Round, 2021). We extracted binary presence/absence data for biphones from the lexical data following the procedure described in Macklin-Cordes et al (2021), which extracts all two-segment sequences from each lexical item (including word boundaries)-e.g.…”

“…To address this, we supplemented the lexical data with phonotactic data, which has been explored as a source phylogenetic signal recently (Dockum, 2017;Macklin-Cordes, Bowern and Round, 2021). We extracted binary presence/absence data for biphones from the lexical data following the procedure described in Macklin-Cordes et al (2021), which extracts all two-segment sequences from each lexical item (including word boundaries)-e.g. Tokyo atama 'head' has the following biphones: #a, at, ta, am, ma, a#.…”

Where have all the sound changes gone? Examining the scarcity of evidence for regular sound change in Australian languages

“…In technical phylogenetic parlance, such a correspondence is known as phylogenetic signal (Blomberg and Garland 2002). In recent work, Macklin-Cordes, Bowern and Round (2021) show that for the simplest of phonotactic traits 4 in Pama-Nyungan, phylogenetic signal relative to the 'cognate'-based phylogenies is remarkably high. This simply would not be expected if the presumed-cognate data of the earlier phylogenetic studies was wildly off the mark.…”

The evolution of similarity avoidance: a phylogenetic approach to phonotactic change

“…For instance, hypothetical *bnick is not well-formed in English, but similar forms are valid in other languages, e.g., Moroccan Arabic bniqa 'closet' (Gorman, 2011). Furthermore, lineage-specific phonotactic patterns exhibit high diachronic stability and phylogenetic signal (Macklin-Cordes et al, 2021).…”