Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

A familiar complaint about statisticians and applied mathematicians is that they are the possessors of a relatively small number of rather elegant hammers with which they roam the world seeking convenient nails to pound, or at least screws they can pretend are nails. One all too often hears tales of scholars who have begun to describe the details of their particular research problem to a statistician, only to have the statistician latch on to a few phrases early in the conversation and then glibly announce that the problem is an exemplar of a standard one in statistics that has a convenient, pre-packaged solution - preferably one that uses some voguish, recently developed technique (bootstrap, wavelets, Markov chain Monte Carlo, hidden Markov models,...)

The inference of evolutionary history, whether in biology or in linguistics, is aided by a carefully considered model of the evolutionary process and a reconstruction method which is expected to produce a reasonably accurate estimation of the true evolutionary history when the real data match the model assumptions and are of sufficient quantity. In molecular systematics (i.e., the inference of evolutionary histories from molecular data), much of the research effort has focused in two areas: first, the development of increasingly parameter rich models of molecular sequence evolution, and second, the development of increasingly sophisticated software tools and algorithms for reconstructing phylogenies under these models. The plethora of software for reconstructing phylogenies from molecular data is staggering. By comparison, much less has been done in historical linguistics in terms of developing statistical models of character evolution or reconstruction methods, suggesting that there is perhaps much to be gained by doing so. ...

Researchers interested in the history of the Indo-European family of languages have used a variety of methods to estimate the phylogeny of the family, and have obtained widely differing results. In this paper we explore the reconstructions of the Indo- European phylogeny obtained by using the major phylogeny estimation procedures on an existing database of 336 characters (including lexical, phonological, and morpho- logical characters) for 24 Indo-European languages. Our study finds that the different methods agree in part, but that there are also several striking differences. We dis- cuss the reasons for these differences, and make proposals with respect to phylogenetic reconstruction in historical linguistics.