%0 Journal Article %A Verkerk, Annemarie %+ Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society %T Detecting non-tree-like signal using multiple tree topologies : %G eng %U https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0007-8EE4-8 %R 10.1075/jhl.17009.ver %F OTHER: shh2280 %7 2019-07-02 %D 2019 %8 01.07.2019 %* Review method: peer-reviewed %X Recent applications of phylogenetic methods to historical linguistics have been criticized for assuming a tree structure in which ancestral languages differentiate and split up into daughter languages, while language evolution is inherently non-tree-like (François 2014; Blench 2015: 32–33). This article attempts to contribute to this debate by discussing the use of the multiple topologies method (Pagel & Meade 2006a) implemented in BayesPhylogenies (Pagel & Meade 2004). This method is applied to lexical datasets from four different language families: Austronesian (Gray, Drummond & Greenhill 2009), Sinitic (Ben Hamed & Wang 2006), Indo-European (Bouckaert et al. 2012), and Japonic (Lee & Hasegawa 2011). Evidence for multiple topologies is found in all families except, surprisingly, Austronesian. It is suggested that reticulation may arise from a number of processes, including dialect chain break-up, borrowing (both shortly after language splits and later on), incomplete lineage sorting, and characteristics of lexical datasets. It is shown that the multiple topologies method is a useful tool to study the dynamics of language evolution. %K Austronesian, Bayesian phylogenetic inference, Indo-European, Japonic, language contact, reticulation and Sinitic %J Journal of Historical Linguistics %V 9 %N 1 %& 9 %P 9 - 69 %I John Benjamins %C Amsterdam %@ 2210-21162210-2124