Most scholars agree that grammatical borrowing is a serious obstacle to syntactic reconstruction, but to date there have been few proposed solutions to this methodological conundrum. In this paper I propose a method, couched in a constructional view of language, for mitigating the problem of borrowing in syntactic reconstruction. The method begins with the reconstruction of partially schematic constructions, whose phonological material can be tested for cognacy. Fully schematic reconstructions are then achieved via generalizations made over sets of reconstructed constructions. I exemplify the effectiveness of this method by applying it to two pieces of grammar from the Sogeram languages of Papua New Guinea: clause chain nominalization and the desiderative construction. The method allows the reconstruction of the former, but identifies the latter as a likely grammatical borrowing and therefore not reconstructable to Proto-Sogeram.

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This paper presents two innovations in the clause chaining system of the Sogeram languages of Papua New Guinea. In the first, chain-final morphology was reanalyzed as chain-medial morphology with different-subject switch reference meaning. In the second, common collocations of two verbs in a clause chain were reanalyzed as constituting a single compound verb stem. Previously, scholars held that increased structural integration of clauses necessarily results in structural asymmetry (that is, subordination), but the Sogeram data show that this need not always be the case. The cross-linguistic impulse towards increased integration is realized in both innovations, but the impulse towards asymmetry is only realized in the first. This paper thus argues that with coordinate source constructions such as these clause chains, one clause may become subordinate to the other, but the clauses may also retain their coordinate relationship as they become more integrated.

Historical Glottometry is a method, recently proposed by Kalyan and François (François 2014; Kalyan & François 2018), for analyzing and representing the relationships among sister languages in a language family. We present a glottometric analysis of the Sogeram language family of Papua New Guinea and, in the process, provide an evaluation of the method. We focus on three topics that we regard as problematic: how to handle the higher incidence of cross-cutting isoglosses in the Sogeram data; how best to handle lexical innovations; and what to do when the data do not allow the analyst to be sure whether a given language underwent a given innovation or not. For each topic we compare different ways of coding and calculating the data and suggest the best way forward. We conclude by proposing changes to the way glottometric data are coded and calculated and the way glottometric results are visualized. We also discuss how to incorporate Historical Glottometry into an effective historical-linguistic research workflow.

The principle of directionality is an important part of the comparative method: in order to arrive at a reconstruction, historical linguists need a robust theory that informs them in what direction linguistic change is likely to proceed. But any such theory will have exceptions. How are these to be spotted? I examine one case in which a counter-directional change, degrammaticalization, can be reconstructed by invoking the phonotactics of the proto-language. The degrammaticalized form is the Sirva 3sgpronounbe, and the proto-language is Proto-Sogeram. After making this reconstruction, I also demonstrate that it can be used to enhance our understanding of degrammaticalization.Bespawned a small family of related forms, which shows us that degrammaticalized forms can become polygrammaticalized in the same way as other grammatical morphemes.