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Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity
Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh
Editors
Quantitative methods in linguistics, which the protean American structuralist linguist Morris Swadesh introduced in the 1950s, have become increasingly popular and have opened the world of languages to interdisciplinary approaches. The papers collected here are the work not only of descriptive and historical linguists, but also statisticians, physicists and computer scientists. They demonstrate the application of quantitative methods to the elucidation of linguistic prehistory on an unprecedented world-wide scale, providing cutting-edge insights into issues of the linguistic correlates of subsistence strategies, rates of birth and extinction of languages, lexical borrowability, the identification of language family homelands, the assessment of genealogical relationships, and the development of new phylogenetic methods appropriate for linguistic data.
Originally published in Diachronica 27:2 (2010).
Originally published in Diachronica 27:2 (2010).
[Benjamins Current Topics, 46] 2012. x, 182 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 31 August 2012
Published online on 31 August 2012
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
- Articles / Aufsätze
- Swadesh’s life and place in linguisticsAnthony P. Grant | pp. 1–6
- A full-scale test of the language farming dispersal hypothesisHarald Hammarström | pp. 7–22
- Do languages originate and become extinct at constant rates?Eric W. Holman | pp. 23–34
- Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabularyUri Tadmor, Martin Haspelmath and Bradley Taylor | pp. 35–55
- Homelands of the world’s language families: A quantitative approachSøren Wichmann, André Müller and Viveka Velupillai | pp. 57–86
- On using qualitative lexicostatistics to illuminate language history: Some techniques and case studiesAnthony P. Grant | pp. 87–111
- Beyond lexicostatistics: How to get more out of ‘word list’ comparisonsPaul Heggarty | pp. 113–137
- Phonetic comparison, varieties, and networks: Swadesh’s influence lives on here tooJennifer Sullivan and April McMahon | pp. 139–154
- A stochastic local search approach to language tree reconstructionFrancesca Tria, Emanuele Caglioti, Vittorio Loreto and Andrea Pagnani | pp. 155–172
- Index
- Author index | pp. 173–175
- Index of languages and language groups | pp. 177–179
- Subject index | pp. 181–182
“This collection is an important contribution to quantitative methods to linguistic diversity.”
Steve Moran, University of Zurich and University of Marburg, in Studies in Language Vol. 38:1 (2014)
Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Anderson, Cormac, Matthew Scarborough, Lechosław Jocz, Martin Joachim Kümmel, Thomas Jügel, Britta Irslinger, Roland Pooth, Henrik Liljegren, Richard F. Strand, Geoffrey Haig, Ulrich Geupel, Martin Macak, Ronald I. Kim, Erik Anonby, Tijmen Pronk, Oleg Belyaev, Tonya Kim Dewey-Findell, Matthew Boutilier, Cassandra Freiberg, Robert Tegethoff, Matilde Serangeli, Krzysztof Stroński, Alexander Falileyev, Nikos Liosis, Kim Schulte, Ganesh Kumar Gupta, Raheleh Izadifar, Patrycja Markus, Nicholas Williams, Simone Loi, Nicholas Sims-Williams, Martin Findell, Shirin Adibifar, Giovanni Abete, Petar Atanasov, Esther Baiwir, Maria-Reina Bastardas, Adam Benkato, Lisa Shugert Bevevino, Éva Buchi, Giorgio Cadorini, Chundra Cathcart, Loïc Cheveau, Charalambos Christodoulou, Jérémie Delorme, Steven N. Dworkin, Deniz Ekici, Shervin Farridnejad, Mojtaba Gheitasi, Harald Hammarström, Steve Hewitt, Afsar Ali Khan, Muhammad Kamal Khan, Liudmila Khokhlova, Deborah Kim, Christopher Lewin, Borana Lushaj, Parvin Mahmoudveysi, Masoud Mahommadirad, Sam Mersch, Baydaa Mustafa, Fatemeh Nemati, Maryam Nourzaei, Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, Virginia Oogjen, Muhammed Ourang, Heather Pagan, Timothy S. Palmer, Steve Pepper, Mandar Purandare, Khwaja Rehman, Guto Rhys, Unn Røyneland, Muhammad Zaman Sagar, Jade Jørgen Sandstedt, Lars Steensland, Mortaza Taheri-Ardali, Mahnaz Talebi-Dastenaei, Sabine Tittel, Tiago Tresoldi, Michiel de Vaan, Annemarie Verkerk, Arjen Versloot, Paul Videsott, Nikola Vuletić, Manuel Widmer, Arash Zeini, Hans-Jörg Bibiko, Fiona Runge, Russell D. Gray & Paul Heggarty
Selvi, Eleonora
Durkin, Philip
Verschueren, Jef
Borchsenius, Finn, Aymeric Daval-Markussen & Peter Bakker
2017. Phylogenetics in biology and linguistics. In Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, ► pp. 35 ff.
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