Phylogenetic signal and rate of evolutionary change in language structures.

ABSTRACT: Within linguistics, there is an ongoing debate about whether some language structures remain stable over time, which structures these are and whether they can be used to uncover the relationships between languages. However, there is no consensus on the definition of the term 'stability'. I define 'stability' as a high phylogenetic signal and a low rate of change. I use metric D to measure the phylogenetic signal and Hidden Markov Model to calculate the evolutionary rate for 171 structural features coded for 12 Japonic, 2 Koreanic, 14 Mongolic, 11 Tungusic and 21 Turkic languages. To more deeply investigate the differences in evolutionary dynamics of structural features across areas of grammar, I divide the features into 4 language domains, 13 functional categories and 9 parts of spe

SUBMITTER: Hubler N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8965403 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature