基本説明
This book considers how languages have traditionally been divided into families, and asks how they should classified in the future. It describes and applies computer programs from biology and evolutionary genetics to data about languages and shows how the power of the computer can be harnessed to throw light on long-standing problems in historical linguistics.
Full Description
This book considers how languages have traditionally been divided into families, and asks how they should be classified in the future. It tests current theories and hypotheses, shows how new ideas can be formulated, and offers a series of demonstrations that the new techniques applied to old data can produce convincing results. It will be of great practical interest to all those concerned with the classification and diffusion of languages in fields such as comparative linguistics, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology.
Contents
1. How do Linguists Classify Languages? ; 2. Lexicostatistics ; 3. Tree-Based Quantitative Approaches - Computational Cladistics ; 4. Tree-Based Quantitative Approaches: Sublists ; 5. Correlations Between Genetic and Linguistic Data ; 6. Climbing Down from the Trees: Network Models ; 7. Dating ; 8. Quantitative Methods Beyond the Lexicon
