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Phylogenetic comparative analysis: an introduction and practical| old_uid | 14043 |
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| title | Phylogenetic comparative analysis: an introduction and practical |
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| start_date | 2014/05/23 |
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| schedule | 14h |
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| online | no |
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| details | Thème de la séance : Langage & Evolution |
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| summary | There are three academic fields that undertake comparative analysis: biology, anthropology, and linguistics. Conceptual parallels between historical comparative studies in biology, anthropology and linguistics have been cross-fertilizing these three fields throughout history (Atkinson & Gray 2005). This is also happening with the recent adoption of phylogenetic methods from biology into linguistics. First, linguists started using statistical methods developed by evolutionary biologists for phylogenetic tree inference, i.e. analyses of how languages are related (Nichols and Warnow 2008). More recently, methods for the comparative analysis of linguistic features on the branches of a phylogenetic tree have been started to be used by linguists as well (Dunn et al. 2011; Levinson & Gray 2012). These latter types of methods can be subsumed under the term ‘phylogenetic comparative methods’ (Harvey & Pagel 1991).
Phylogenetic comparative methods can be used to investigate a range of diachronic inquiries, including questions about 1) homelands of language families, 2) order in the sequences of linguistic change, 3) dating language family trees, 4) rates of linguistic change, 5) correlations between sets of linguistic features, and 6) ancestral states of linguistic features (Gray et al. 2007). How this is done and why these methods are promising new techniques to be used by linguistic typologists and historical linguists will be explained by means of a practical.
In this practical, we will conduct phylogenetic comparative analyses using data from the World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer and Haspelmath 2013) from Austronesian languages using the software package BayesTraits (Pagel and Mead n.d.). First, we will look at data on morphological affixing and reconstruct the ancestral state of Proto-Austronesian, i.e. we will find out whether Proto-Austronesian was affixing or not. Secondly, we will investigate whether nominal plurality has become more complex the further east we go in the Pacific. Anybody with a connection to the internet will be able to participate in doing these phylogenetic comparative analyses together. |
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| responsibles | Carlier |
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