An evolutionary science of phonology and morphology: What will it take to get there?
Erich Round (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena; University of Queensland)
Tuesday, October 29
11:00am – 12:30pm
G32, 7 George Square
Linguists are increasingly interested in explaining the observable diversity of the world’s languages in terms of the historical-evolutionary process by which they arise. But is that goal realistic? And what would it take to get there? To begin, we will need theories and models of evolutionary processes that spell out the factors involved in historical events and their probabilities of occurring within given time spans under a range of conditions. To then test those theories against empirical data, we will need phylogenies of language families, and if we are to evaluate hypothesised probabilities of changes we’ll need phylogenies with explicit branch lengths and quantifications of uncertainty. Currently, phylogenies that meet these desiderata can be generated by lexical phylolinguistic methods, but there is a wrinkle: those methods are based on cognacy judgements which in turn require an already existing hypothesis about the history of the language family, meaning that they are at least partly circular, and are dependent upon the manual comparative method, which is yet to be carried out on the vast majority of the world’s languages. What we might do in response? In this talk I explore two paths forward. I review emerging first results from research into phonotactic phylogenetics, which probes the phylogenetic signal contained within statistical patterns in the lexicon without requiring cognacy judgements. I then turn to the question of whether we could attempt to conduct core parts of the comparative method, namely the inference of sound change and morphological change, in an automated fashion. Until very recently such an idea was flatly unrealistic, but subsequent advances in statistics have opened new doors which were closed to us just a decade ago. The key, it appears, will be to build certain kinds of precise mathematical models of change within paradigms. I discuss what those models might look like and the kinds of science that their use might enable.