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Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Historical Linguistics Année : 2019

When the waves meet the trees: A response to Jacques and List

Siva Kalyan
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Résumé

This special issue of the _Journal of Historical Linguistics_, titled “Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model”, was created with the idea of opening a constructive debate around the issues raised by the Tree model. We (Kalyan and François) had previously published articles highlighting the shortcomings of the tree for representing language history, and promoting an approach – called Historical Glottometry – based on the Wave model (François 2014, 2017; Kalyan & François 2018). We invited two historical linguists, Guillaume Jacques and Johann-Mattis List, as discussants in our volume; their chapter “Save the trees: Why we need tree models in linguistic reconstruction” [doi:10.1075/jhl.17008.mat] argued in favour of the Tree model – and this is our final response. In this response article, we review our apparently conflicting perspectives, but endeavour to find common ground between them – hence the title “when the waves meet the trees”. We show that our differences are partly due to distinct definitions of key concepts (subgroup, shared innovations…). We also show that the argument of “Incomplete lineage sorting”, which they use to defend the tree, could as well defend the wave model, since it can capture the key notion of intersecting innovations that is so prevalent in linkages, and so problematic in the traditional tree approach. The final part of our response shows how Historical Glottometry (HG) provides a way to reconstruct the historical process of ‘linkage breaking’, whereby a dialect continuum breaks progressively into separate languages. All in all, our two approaches are fundamentally compatible – even though we find the Wave model, ultimately, to be more realistic.
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Dates et versions

hal-01967334 , version 1 (30-12-2018)

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Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François. When the waves meet the trees: A response to Jacques and List. Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2019, Journal of Historical Linguistics, 9 (1), pp.167-176. ⟨10.1075/jhl.18019.kal⟩. ⟨hal-01967334⟩
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