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N°Spécial De Revue/Special Issue Journal of Historical Linguistics Année : 2019

Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model

Siva Kalyan
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Harald Hammarström
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Résumé

There are important reasons to be sceptical of the accuracy and usefulness of the family-tree model in historical linguistics. That model assumes that every linguistic innovation applies to a language considered as an undifferentiated whole, a point with no “width”. But this assumption makes it impossible to use a tree to model the partial diffusion of an innovation within a language community (“internal diffusion”), or the diffusion of an innovation across language communities (“external diffusion”). These limitations have long been noticed by historical linguists (Schmidt 1872, Schuchardt 1900); but they become glaringly obvious in the cases discussed by Ross (1988) and François (2014) under the heading of “linkages” – i.e., language families that arise through the diversification, in situ, of a dialect network. The articles in this special issue all contribute towards addressing this problem, from a range of perspectives.
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Dates et versions

hal-01967333 , version 1 (30-12-2018)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01967333 , version 1

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Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François, Harald Hammarström. Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model. Journal of Historical Linguistics, 9 (1), 2019. ⟨hal-01967333⟩
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