Eric W. Holman
List of John Benjamins publications in which Eric W. Holman is involved.
Articles
2012 Do languages originate and become extinct at constant rates? Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity: Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh, Wichmann, Søren and Anthony P. Grant (eds.), pp. 23–34 | Article
The shape of phylogenetic trees of language families is used to test the null hypothesis that languages throughout a family originate and go extinct at constant rates. Trees constructed either by hand or by computer prove to be more unbalanced than predicted, with many languages on some branches… read more
2010 Do languages originate and become extinct at constant rates? Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity: Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh, Wichmann, Søren and Anthony P. Grant (eds.), pp. 214–225 | Article
The shape of phylogenetic trees of language families is used to test the null hypothesis that languages throughout a family originate and go extinct at constant rates. Trees constructed either by hand or by computer prove to be more unbalanced than predicted, with many languages on some branches… read more
2004 Why are language families larger in some regions than in others? Diachronica 21:1, pp. 57–84 | Article
For most of the world’s language families that are not included in yet larger families, published sources were surveyed to determine the number of languages in the family, and also the lexical diversity among those languages as measured by cognate percentages in lexicostatistical wordlists. In this… read more