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Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 38:2 (2021) ► pp.210–258

Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics

ORCID logo | The University of Queensland
ORCID logo | Yale University
ORCID logo | The University of Queensland | University of Surrey | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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.
Keywords: historical signal, phylogenetic comparative methods, historical linguistics, phonology, comparative linguistics, linguistic phylogenetics, Pama-Nyungan, Australian languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Motivations
    • 1.2Phonotactics as a source of historical signal
  • 2.Phylogenetic signal
  • 3.Materials
    • 3.1Language sample
    • 3.2Wordlists
    • 3.3Reference phylogeny
  • 4.Phylogenetic signal in binary phonotactic data
    • 4.1Results for binary phonotactic data
    • 4.2Robustness checks
  • 5.Phylogenetic signal in continuous phonotactic data
    • 5.1Robustness checks
    • 5.2Forward transitions versus backward transitions
    • 5.3Normalization of character values
  • 6.Phylogenetic signal in natural-class-based characters
    • 6.1Natural-class-based characters versus biphones
  • 7.Discussion
    • 7.1Overall robustness
    • 7.2Limitations
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Author contribution statement
  • Supplementary materials
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 2 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20004.mac
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