%0 Journal Article
%A Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L.
%A Bowern, Claire
%A Round, Erich
%+ Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society
%T Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics  : 
%G eng
%U https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0008-7ADD-7
%R 10.1075/dia.20004.mac
%7 2021-02-02
%D 2021
%* Review method: peer-reviewed
%X 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 – 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.
%K  Australian languages; historical signal; comparative linguistics; historical linguistics; phonology; linguistic phylogenetics; phylogenetic comparative methods; Pama-Nyungan 
%J Diachronica
%V 38
%N 2
%& 210
%P 210 - 258
%I Olms
%C Hildesheim
%@ 0176-4225