Phylogeny-based network approaches are a powerful tool to study language history. Based on a reference tree, they infer the minimal amount of transfer events that is needed to explain the patterning of cognate sets observed in contemporary languages. Since these approaches handle both vertical and lateral aspects of language history, they seem perfectly adequate to study Chinese dialect history...

Theories about the first Indo-European migration are numerous. Significant contribution in attempt to resolve these theories is given by analysing skeletal material from two biggest prehistoric archaeological sites from N-E Croatia. Eight skeletons of Starcevo culture from sites "Nama" and "Hotel" at Vinkovci (6100-5500 BC) and seven skeletons of Vucedol culture from the site Vineyard Streim at...

Scholars have documented substantial classes of iconic vocabulary in many non-Indo-European languages. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English are assumed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments, we asked English speakers to rate the iconicity of words from the MacArthurBates Communicative Developmental Inventory. We found English—contra...

We present a theory of grammar based on asymmetrical relations, the Strict Asymmetry Theory, and we provide evidence form Indo-European and non Indo-European languages to show that argument structure restrictions on morphological composition follow in a principled way from the theory. We describe and implement a bottom-up parser for morphological selection in the Strict Asymmetry framework. Cor...

The nineteenth and early twentieth-century intellectual claim to European ancestry stems from the ‘Aryan Myth’—the linguistic equating of Iranians as direct descendants Aryans, or Indo-Europeans. historical genesis word ‘Aryan’ was influenced by First Persian Empire (550-330 B.C.E.) in reference an Iranian homeland, nineteenth-century Western linguists’ associations with ancestral Indo-European...

This study uses phylogenetic methods adopted from computational biology in order to reconstruct features of Proto-Indo-European morphosyntax. We estimate the probability presence typological on assumption that these change according a stochastic process governed by evolutionary transition rates between them. compare probabilities previous reconstructions morphosyntax, which use either comparati...

The structure of Malay presents the corpus linguist with an extremely interesting problem. At high syntactic levels, the language is familiar enough, and one can talk of direct objects in transitive constructions, and even of agentless passives. The dominant sentence order is SVO. Parsing at this level is therefore relatively straightforward. The problem is at lower levels, where Malay patterns...