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Article published In: Diachronica
Vol. 35:1 (2018) ► pp.1–34

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Areal pressure in grammatical evolution

An Indo-European case study

 | Lund University | University of Zurich
 | Lund University
 | Lund University
 | Lund University
 | University of Queensland | University of Surrey
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 16 April 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.16035.cat
Abstract
This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 Indo-European languages. We partition types of change (i.e., gain or loss) for each variant according to whether they bring about a simplification in morphosyntactic patterns that must be learned, whether they are neutral (i.e., neither simplifying nor introducing complexity) or whether they introduce a more complex pattern. We find that changes which introduce complexity show significantly less areal signal (according to a metric we devise) than changes which simplify and neutral changes, but we find no significant differences between the latter two groups. This result is compatible with a scenario where certain types of parallel change are more likely to be mediated by advergence and contact between proximate speech communities, while other developments are due purely to drift and are largely independent of intercultural contact.
Résumé
Cet article traite de la dynamique évolutionnaire et spatiale des caractéristiques typologiques dans 117 langues indo-européennes. Trois catégories de développements linguistiques ont été établies: (1) simplification, (2) neutralisation, et (3) complexification. Nous constatons que les développements qui créent de la complexité démontrent un niveau de concentration spatiotemporelle inférieur, de façon significative, par rapport aux deux autres types de changement. Ce résultat est compatible avec une situation dans laquelle certains changements proviendraient de contacts bilatéraux et de contacts entre des communautés linguistiques proches géographiquement, tandis que les autres seraient purement aléatoires, et n'auraient aucun lien avec le degré de contact entre différentes communautés linguistiques.
Zusammenfassung
Dieser Beitrag behandelt die evolutionäre und räumliche Entwicklung einiger typologischer Charak-teristika in 117 indoeuropäischen Sprachen. Wir untergliedern die Studie hinsichtlich der Kategorien des Sprachwandels, welcher bei jeder der untersuchten Varianten auftritt: (1) Wandel, der zu einer Simplifizierung erlernter morphosyntaktischer Strukturen führt (2) neutraler Wandel (also weder Simplifizierung noch Komplexifizierung), und (3) Wandel, der eine komplexere Struktur mit sich bringt Dabei können wir beobachten, dass Wandelphänomene, die zu einem Anstieg an Komplexität führen, gemäβ der von uns entwickelten Metrik signifikant weniger räumliche Ausprägungen zeigen als Simplifizierungen und neutraler Wandel; allerdings finden wir keine signifikanten Unterschiede innerhalb der letzten beiden Gruppen. Dieses Ergebnis lässt sich verbinden mit einem Szenario, bei dem bestimmte Typen des Sprachwandels eher durch Advergenz und Kontakt zwischen benach-barten Sprachgemeinschaften vermittelt wird, während andere Entwicklungen lediglich auf Drift zurückzuführen und groβenteils unabhängig von interkulturellem Kontakt sind.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous literature
    • 2.1Quantitative typology
    • 2.2Phylogenetic linguistics and graphical models
  • 3.Materials and methods
  • 4.Data
    • 4.1DiACL
      • 4.1.1Areal dynamics across the dataset
    • 4.2Tree sample
      • 4.2.1Ancestry constraints
  • 5.Model
    • 5.1Evolutionary model
      • 5.1.1Rate inference
    • 5.2Changes in time and space
      • 5.2.1Character mapping
      • 5.2.2Ancestral state reconstruction
      • 5.2.3Birth/death simulation
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Evaluation metrics
      • 6.1.1Capturing data at tips
      • 6.1.2Capturing ancient/medieval data
      • 6.1.3Dependencies
    • 6.2Reconstructions
    • 6.3Analysis
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Appendices
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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