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Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Historical Linguistics Année : 2019

Problems with, and alternatives to, the tree model in historical linguistics

Siva Kalyan
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  • PersonId : 1041107
Harald Hammarström
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  • PersonId : 1041109

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-01967335 , version 1 (31-12-2018)

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Citer

Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François, Harald Hammarström. Problems with, and alternatives to, the tree model in historical linguistics. Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2019, Journal of Historical Linguistics, 9 (1), pp.1-8. ⟨10.1075/jhl.00005.kal⟩. ⟨hal-01967335⟩
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