Sequence Comparison In Historical Linguistics

The comparison of sound sequences (words, morphemes) constitutes the core of many techniques and methods in historical linguistics. With the help of these techniques, corresponding sounds can be determined, historically related words can be identified, and the history of languages can be uncovered. So far, the application of traditional techniques for sequence comparison is very tedious and time-consuming, since scholars have to apply them manually, without computational support. In this study, algorithms from bioinformatics are used to develop computational methods for sequence comparison in historical linguistics. The new methods automatize several steps of the traditional comparative method and can thus help to ease the painstaking work of language comparison. Dissertations in Language and Cognition This series explores issues of mental representation, lingustic structure and representation, and their interplay. The research presented in this series is grounded in the idea explored in the Collaborative Research Center 'The structure of representations in language, cognition and science' (SFB 991) that there is a universal format for the representation of linguistic and cognitive concepts.

The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is organized every year by the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different sites around Europe. The main focus of ESSLLI is on the interface between linguistics, logic and computation. ESSLLI offers foundational, introductory and advanced courses, as well as workshops, covering a wide variety of topics within the three areas of interest: Language and Computation, Language and Logic, and Logic and Computation. During two weeks, around 50 courses and 10 workshops are offered to the attendants, each of 1.5 hours per day during a five days week, with up to seven parallel sessions. ESSLLI also includes a student session (papers and posters by students only, 1.5 hour per day during the two weeks) and four evening lectures by senior scientists in the covered areas. The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers are organized in topical sections on The papers are organized in topical sections on language and computation; logic and computation; and logic and language.

A guide to principles and methods for the management, archiving, sharing, and citing of linguistic research data, especially digital data. "Doing language science" depends on collecting, transcribing, annotating, analyzing, storing, and sharing linguistic research data. This volume offers a guide to linguistic data management, engaging with current trends toward the transformation of linguistics into a more data-driven and reproducible scientific endeavor. It offers both principles and methods, presenting the conceptual foundations of linguistic data management and a series of case studies, each of which demonstrates a concrete application of abstract principles in a current practice. In part 1, contributors bring together knowledge from information science, archiving, and data stewardship relevant to linguistic data management. Topics covered include implementation principles, archiving data, finding and using datasets, and the valuation of time and effort involved in data management. Part 2 presents snapshots of practices across various subfields, with each chapter presenting a unique data management project with generalizable guidance for researchers. The Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management is an essential addition to the toolkit of every linguist, guiding researchers toward making their data FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

This volume aims to clarify the epistemic potential of applying evolutionary thinking outside biology, and provides a survey of the current state of the art in research on relevant topics in the life sciences, the philosophy of science, and the various areas of evolutionary research outside the life sciences. By bringing together chapters by evolutionary biologists, systematic biologists, philosophers of biology, philosophers of social science, complex systems modelers, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, linguists, historians, and educators, the volume examines evolutionary thinking within and outside the life sciences from a multidisciplinary perspective. While the chapters written by biologists and philosophers of science address theoretical aspects of the guiding questions and aims of the volume, the chapters written by researchers from the other areas approach them from the perspective of applying evolutionary thinking to non-biological phenomena. Taken together, the chapters in this volume do not only show how evolutionary thinking can be fruitfully applied in various areas of investigation, but also highlight numerous open problems, unanswered questions, and issues on which more clarity is needed. As such, the volume can serve as a starting point for future research on the application of evolutionary thinking across disciplines.

It is hardly an overstatement to say that Soviet linguists had a monopoly over Tajik linguistics before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when most studies on the language were accessible exclusively through Russian and Tajik. Today, however, linguists dealing with Tajik are diverse not only in terms of their location but also in terms of their disciplinary orientation within linguistics, making it difficult for the general linguist to work out the state of the art of the linguistic study of Tajik. This volume aims to address this difficulty by collecting in a handbook format recent (post-Soviet) developments in the study of Tajik that now lie scattered in different subdisciplines of linguistics. The volume thus showcases the state of the art of post-Soviet Tajik linguistics and can be used as a guide for linguists interested in the language.

An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.

This volume seeks to infer large phylogenetic networks from phonetically encoded lexical data and contribute in this way to the historical study of language varieties. The technical step that enables progress in this case is the use of causal inference algorithms. Sample sets of words from language varieties are preprocessed into automatically inferred cognate sets, and then modeled as information-theoretic variables based on an intuitive measure of cognate overlap. Causal inference is then applied to these variables in order to determine the existence and direction of influence among the varieties. The directed arcs in the resulting graph structures can be interpreted as reflecting the existence and directionality of lexical flow, a unified model which subsumes inheritance and borrowing as the two main ways of transmission that shape the basic lexicon of languages. A flow-based separation criterion and domain-specific directionality detection criteria are developed to make existing causal inference algorithms more robust against imperfect cognacy data, giving rise to two new algorithms. The Phylogenetic Lexical Flow Inference (PLFI) algorithm requires lexical features of proto-languages to be reconstructed in advance, but yields fully general phylogenetic networks, whereas the more complex Contact Lexical Flow Inference (CLFI) algorithm treats proto-languages as hidden common causes, and only returns hypotheses of historical contact situations between attested languages. The algorithms are evaluated both against a large lexical database of Northern Eurasia spanning many language families, and against simulated data generated by a new model of language contact that builds on the opening and closing of directional contact channels as primary evolutionary events. The algorithms are found to infer the existence of contacts very reliably, whereas the inference of directionality remains difficult. This currently limits the new algorithms to a role as exploratory tools for quickly detecting salient patterns in large lexical datasets, but it should soon be possible for the framework to be enhanced e.g. by confidence values for each directionality decision.

Intended for use in advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses, this text presents a wide survey of methodological procedures and theoretical positions.