Evaluation of hypotheses on genetic relationships depends on two factors:
database size and criteria on correspondence quality. For hypotheses on remote
relationships, databases are often small. Therefore, detailed consideration of
criteria on correspondence quality is important. Hypotheses on remote
relationships commonly involve greater geographical and temporal ranges.
Consequently, we propose that there are two factors which are likely to play a
greater role in comparing hypotheses of chance, contact and inheritance for
remote relationships: (i) spatial distribution of corresponding forms; and (ii)
language specific unpredictability in related paradigms. Concentrated spatial
distributions disfavour hypotheses of chance, and discontinuous distributions
disfavour contact hypotheses, whereas hypotheses of inheritance may accommodate
both. Higher levels of language-specific unpredictability favour remote over
recent transmission. We consider a remote relationship hypothesis, the
Proto-Australian hypothesis. We take noun class prefixation as a test dataset
for evaluating this hypothesis against these two criteria, and we show that
inheritance is favoured over chance and contact.
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