Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Computational approaches to historical linguistics have been proposed for half a century. Within the last decade, this line of research has received a major boost, owing both to the transfer of ideas and software from computational biology and to the release of several large electronic data resources suitable for systematic comparative work. In this article, some of the central research topics of this new wave of computational historical linguistics are introduced and discussed. These areautomatic assessment of genetic relatedness,automatic cognate detection,phylogenetic inferenceandancestral state reconstruction. They will be demonstrated by means of a case study of automatically reconstructing a Proto-Romance word list from lexical data of 50 modern Romance languages and dialects. The results illustrate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the current state of the art of automating the comparative method.
Source: Theoretical Linguistics
DOI: 10.1515/tl-2019-0011
Author: Gerhard Jäger
Institution: University of Tübingen
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid:
Funder: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Awards: G534521444, G7258815532
OpenAlex ID: W2803395244