Cladistic Parsimony, Historical Linguistics and Cultural Phylogenetics

Historical Linguistics

One remarkably striking observation about language, seemingly trivial but actually quite important, is that languages change through time. It is at least conceivable that language could remain unchanged over time, as is the case with some other human institutions, e.g. various tabus or the rules to come games, and with some aspects of human communication systems, e.g. Morse Code or the value of...

Parsimony, likelihood, and the role of models in molecular phylogenetics.

Methods such as maximum parsimony (MP) are frequently criticized as being statistically unsound and not being based on any "model." On the other hand, advocates of MP claim that maximum likelihood (ML) has some fundamental problems. Here, we explore the connection between the different versions of MP and ML methods, particularly in light of recent theoretical results. We describe links between ...

Historical Linguistics and Cognitive Science

In this paper we investigate possible links between historical linguistics and cognitive science, or theory of the mind. Our primary goal is to demonstrate that historically documented processes of a certain type, i.e. those relating to semantic change and grammaticalization, form a unified theoretical bundle which gives insight into the cognitive processes at work in language organization and ...

Historical linguistics and Philippine hunter-gatherers

This paper addresses several topics with reference to Philippine hunter-gatherer groups that are relevant to an understanding of their relationships with non-hunter-gatherer groups and their significance for historical linguistics. Section 1 first provides a discussion of the demographic ranges of the extant Negrito groups. In section 2, different views as to the time depth of the prehistoric r...

Cultural Linguistics: Cultural Conceptualizations and Language, Farzad Sharifian (2017), John Benjamins, ISBN 9789027204110