Quantifying Language Dynamics: On the Cutting Edge of Areal and Phylogenetic Linguistics

Quantifying Language Dynamics: On the Cutting Edge of Areal and Phylogenetic Linguistics contains specially-selected papers introducing new, quantitative methodologies for understanding language interaction and evolution. It draws upon data from the phonologies, morphologies, numeral systems, constituent orders, case systems, and lexicons of the world’s languages, bringing large datasets and sophisticated statistical techniques to bear on fundamental questions such as: how to identify and account for areal distributions, when language contact leads to grammatical simplification, whether patterns of morphological borrowing can be predicted, how to deal with contact within phylogenetic models, and what new techniques are most effective for classification of the world’s languages. The book is relevant for students and scholars in general linguistics, typology, and historical and comparative linguistics.

Jeff Good, Ph.D. (2003), University of California, Berkeley, is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo. His research interests include comparative Niger-Congo linguistics, morphosyntactic typology, and language documentation. He has published in Language, Diachronica, and Morphology, among others, and serves as General Editor of Language Dynamics and Change.

Søren Wichmann, Ph.D. (1996), University of Copenhagen, is Senior Scientist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and works on historical linguistics, typology, and Mesoamerican languages, often applying quantitative, computational methods. He is founder and General Editor of the journal Language Dynamics and Change.

Contributors are: Christian Bentz, Will Chang, Hans Geisler, Tom Güldemann, Harald Hammarström, Gerhard Jäger, Johann-Mattis List, William Martin, Lev Michael, Shijulal Nelson-Sathi, Frank Seifart, Tammy Stark, and Bodo Winter.