Toward a syntactic phylogeny of modern Indo-European languages

Longobardi, Giuseppe; Guardiano, Cristina; Silvestri, Giuseppina; Boattini, Alessio; Ceolin, Andrea

doi:10.1075/jhl.3.1.07lon

Cited by 48 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…27 Saitou and Nei (1987). 28 Rigon (2009); Longobardi et al (2013). 29 The average number of parameters that are comparable in our dataset according to the Jaccard metric (i.e., parameters where either language displays a "+" without the other displaying a "0") turned out to be 20, with a range between 7 and 30.…”

Section: Measuring Syntactic Distancesmentioning

confidence: 88%

Formal Syntax and Deep History

et al. 2020

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We show that, contrary to long-standing assumptions, syntactic traits, modeled here within the generative biolinguistic framework, provide insights into deep-time language history. To support this claim, we have encoded the diversity of nominal structures using 94 universally definable binary parameters, set in 69 languages spanning across up to 13 traditionally irreducible Eurasian families. We found a phylogenetic signal that distinguishes all such families and matches the family-internal tree topologies that are safely established through classical etymological methods and datasets. We have retrieved “near-perfect” phylogenies, which are essentially immune to homoplastic disruption and only moderately influenced by horizontal convergence, two factors that instead severely affect more externalized linguistic features, like sound inventories. This result allows us to draw some preliminary inferences about plausible/implausible cross-family classifications; it also provides a new source of evidence for testing the representation of diversity in syntactic theories.

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Section: Measuring Syntactic Distancesmentioning

confidence: 88%

Formal Syntax and Deep History

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“…It also allows one to establish the extent of influence of each of the donor languages on the corresponding recipient languages through the computation of the reticulation degree parameter. Some recent studies have used syntactic distances to infer phylogenies of IE languages [83, 84]. Syntactic parameters reveal complementary relationships between languages which are often not reflected by lexicon [83].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using hybridization networks to retrace the evolution of Indo-European languages

et al. 2016

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BackgroundCurious parallels between the processes of species and language evolution have been observed by many researchers. Retracing the evolution of Indo-European (IE) languages remains one of the most intriguing intellectual challenges in historical linguistics. Most of the IE language studies use the traditional phylogenetic tree model to represent the evolution of natural languages, thus not taking into account reticulate evolutionary events, such as language hybridization and word borrowing which can be associated with species hybridization and horizontal gene transfer, respectively. More recently, implicit evolutionary networks, such as split graphs and minimal lateral networks, have been used to account for reticulate evolution in linguistics.ResultsStriking parallels existing between the evolution of species and natural languages allowed us to apply three computational biology methods for reconstruction of phylogenetic networks to model the evolution of IE languages. We show how the transfer of methods between the two disciplines can be achieved, making necessary methodological adaptations. Considering basic vocabulary data from the well-known Dyen’s lexical database, which contains word forms in 84 IE languages for the meanings of a 200-meaning Swadesh list, we adapt a recently developed computational biology algorithm for building explicit hybridization networks to study the evolution of IE languages and compare our findings to the results provided by the split graph and galled network methods.ConclusionWe conclude that explicit phylogenetic networks can be successfully used to identify donors and recipients of lexical material as well as the degree of influence of each donor language on the corresponding recipient languages. We show that our algorithm is well suited to detect reticulate relationships among languages, and present some historical and linguistic justification for the results obtained. Our findings could be further refined if relevant syntactic, phonological and morphological data could be analyzed along with the available lexical data.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12862-016-0745-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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“…For the analysis of linguistic data by PCM [4,16,19,21,22]), we used the 94 binary parameters defining properties of nominal structures for 69 modern Eurasian languages recently employed in [22]. The original dataset of 69 languages has been reduced to a subset of 34 IE, FU and AL languages, to improve resolution on the 17 populations for which genetic data are available and their neighbors [17].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The original dataset of 69 languages has been reduced to a subset of 34 IE, FU and AL languages, to improve resolution on the 17 populations for which genetic data are available and their neighbors [17].…”

Section: Linguistic Datasetmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…PCoA from the syntactic distances in 34 Eurasian populations. Language groups coded as follow:Finno-Ugric (green), Altaic (Blue), Indo-European (red).In the UPGMA tree (Figure 2), languages from the same family, IE, FU and AL neatly cluster together without exception; FU languages form a monophyletic cluster within which the Balto-Finnic (Finnish and Estonian) and Ugric (Hungarian and Khanty) families are well identified, with the addition of a node comprising geographically closer Udmurt (Permic) and Mari (Volgaic)[12,17,42,43].…”

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More rule than exception: Parallel evidence of ancient migrations in grammars and genomes of Finno-Ugric speakers

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González-Fortes

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et al. 2020

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To reconstruct aspects of human demographic history, linguistics and genetics complement each other, reciprocally suggesting testable hypotheses on population relationships and interactions. Relying on a linguistic comparative method exclusively based on syntactic data, here we focus on the complex relation of genes and languages among Finno-Ugric (FU) speakers, in comparison to their Indo-European (IE) and Altaic (AL) neighbors. Syntactic analysis supports three distinct clusters corresponding to these three Eurasian families; yet, the outliers of the FU group show linguistic convergence with their geographical neighbors. By analyzing genome-wide data in both ancient and contemporary populations, we uncovered remarkably matching patterns, with north-western FU speakers linguistically and genetically closer in parallel degrees to their IE-speaking neighbors, and eastern FU speakers to AL-speakers. Therefore, our study indicates plausible secondary convergence in the syntax of languages of different families, providing evidence that such interference effects were accompanied, and possibly caused, by recognizable processes at the population level. In particular, based on the comparison of modern and ancient genomes, our analysis identified the Pontic-Caspian steppes as the possible origin of the demographic processes that led to the expansion of the FU into Europe.

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Toward a syntactic phylogeny of modern Indo-European languages

Cited by 48 publications

References 41 publications

Formal Syntax and Deep History

Formal Syntax and Deep History

Using hybridization networks to retrace the evolution of Indo-European languages

More rule than exception: Parallel evidence of ancient migrations in grammars and genomes of Finno-Ugric speakers

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