% pubman genre = article
@article{item_3318407,
title = {{Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics}},
author = {Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. and Bowern, Claire and Round, Erich},
language = {eng},
issn = {0176-4225},
doi = {10.1075/dia.20004.mac},
publisher = {Olms},
address = {Hildesheim},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-06},
abstract = {{Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data {\textendash} in this instance, statistical phonotactics. We extract phonotactic data from 112 Pama-Nyungan vocabularies and apply tests for phylogenetic signal, quantifying the degree to which the data reflect phylogenetic history. We test three datasets: (1) binary variables recording the presence or absence of biphones (two-segment sequences) in a lexicon (2) frequencies of transitions between segments, and (3) frequencies of transitions between natural sound classes. Australian languages have been characterized as having a high degree of phonotactic homogeneity. Nevertheless, we detect phylogenetic signal in all datasets. Phylogenetic signal is greater in finer-grained frequency data than in binary data, and greatest in natural-class-based data. These results demonstrate the viability of employing a new source of readily extractable data in historical and comparative linguistics.}},
journal = {{Diachronica}},
volume = {38},
number = {2},
pages = {210--258},
}