Current Issues in Linguistic Taxonomy

Abstract

▪ Abstract The genealogical classification of languages has been the subject of investigation for more than two centuries, and progress continues to be made in deepening our understanding of language change, both in theoretical terms and in the study of specific language families. In recent years, as in the past, many new proposals of linguistic relationships have been constructed, some promising to various degrees and others clearly untenable. The debate about specific recent proposals is part of the healthy process needed to evaluate proposed relationships, discard those that prove incorrect, and refine those of merit. Rather than evaluating the relative linguistic “distance” between potentially related languages, with temporal distance leading to some point where we cannot distinguish real relationships from chance similarities, we propose a scale of easy to difficult relationships in which temporal distance is only one factor that makes some relationships more recognizable than others.

A taxonomy of purposeful human activity system signs as a means to improving systems literacy

“…However, research on the proper development of taxonomies is not lacking, especially in the biological (Dayrat, 2005), geological (Dam, 1990) and even management fields (Irani & Love, 2000), to name a very few of many fields effectively utilizing taxonomies for classification and evaluation methods. Taxonomies regarding communication are also quite popular in literature, specifically in biology on animal behaviour (Hurd & Enquist, 2005), linguistics (Michalove, Georg, & Ramer, 1998) and organizational culture (Anumba, 1999).…”

Lumping and splitting: Toward a classification of mineral natural kinds

“…That he found no rigorous answer to the dilemma is a characteristic inherent in many messy natural systems. The tension between "lumping" and "splitting" (the felicitous terms coined by Darwin in that 1857 missive; Endersby 2009) has played a role in virtually every domain where classification holds sway, including extant biology (Simpson 1945;Avise and Johns 1999), paleobiology (Horner and Goodwin 2009;Hublin 2014), sociology (Zerubavel 1996;Berg 2018), history (Hochschild 2000;Stearns 2017), psychiatry (Solomon et al 2011;Marquand et al 2016), linguistics (Michalove et al 2003;Rowe and Levine 2015), philosophy (Piccinini and Scott 2006;Dyson 2015), and musical genres (Bickerstaffe and Makalic 2003;Goulart et al 2012). In each discipline, rival camps advocate competing This is the peer-reviewed, final accepted version for American Mineralogist, published by the Mineralogical Society of America.…”