Formal Syntax and Deep History

Ceolin, Andrea; Guardiano, Cristina; Irimia, Monica Alexandrina; Longobardi, Giuseppe

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.488871

Cited by 16 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 92 publications

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“…Previous PCM experiments [9,10,102] have found that the disruption of the syntactic phylogenetic signal by well-documented but relatively recent convergence and borrowing (i.e. the past 1000/1500 years) is quite limited (in agreement with [100,103]), even in domains where contact has otherwise strongly shaped other linguistic levels (the Balkans, Southern Italy, the Black Sea area).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

“…The most salient is, indeed, ‘macro-Altaic’ (above and [10]): *Tungusic-Turkic-Buryat / Korean-Japanese, d = 0.606, p = 0.842.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the present article, we use a dataset of 94 syntactic parameters, a slightly updated version of that of Ceolin et al . [10], with values assigned in 58 modern languages from 15 traditionally different families of the Old World. Information and references about the languages and the parameter states, along with exploratory analyses and phylogenetic modelling of the data, are shown in the electronic supplementary material.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Historical linguists have explicitly stated the need for new methods to address the relatedness issue [3–5], in order to provide classifications deeper than traditional etymological families [6,7]. We propose a way to tackle this long-standing issue by combining the Parametric Comparison Method (PCM, [8–10]) with a theory of possible languages (see [11]) and with dedicated statistical tools.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the most up-to-date PCM study [10], phylogenetic experiments have been produced from a parametric dataset of modern languages belonging to 13 traditionally irreducible families. Virtually all taxonomic experiments were able to single out all these families, along with most of their internal articulations, as safely established through etymological methods, proving the existence of a historical signal in parametric syntax.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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At the boundaries of syntactic prehistory

Ceolin

Guardiano

Longobardi

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Can language relatedness be established without cognate words? This question has remained unresolved since the nineteenth century, leaving language prehistory beyond etymologically established families largely undefined. We address this problem through a theory of universal syntactic characters. We show that not only does syntax allow for comparison across distinct traditional language families, but that the probability of deeper historical relatedness between such families can be statistically tested through a dedicated algorithm which implements the concept of ‘possible languages’ suggested by a formal syntactic theory. Controversial clusters such as e.g. Altaic and Uralo-Altaic are significantly supported by our test, while other possible macro-groupings, e.g. Indo-Uralic or Basque-(Northeast) Caucasian, prove to be indistinguishable from a randomly generated distribution of language distances. These results suggest that syntactic diversity, modelled through a generative biolinguistic framework, can be used to provide a proof of historical relationship between different families irrespectively of the presence of a common lexicon from which regular sound correspondences can be determined; therefore, we argue that syntax may expand the time limits imposed by the classical comparative method. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

“…The most salient is, indeed, ‘macro-Altaic’ (above and [10]): *Tungusic-Turkic-Buryat / Korean-Japanese, d = 0.606, p = 0.842.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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At the boundaries of syntactic prehistory

Ceolin

Guardiano

Longobardi

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Heat Kernel Analysis of Syntactic Structures

2021

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Topological Analysis of Syntactic Structures

2022

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We use the persistent homology method of topological data analysis and dimensional analysis techniques to study data of syntactic structures of world languages. We analyze relations between syntactic parameters in terms of dimensionality, of hierarchical clustering structures, and of non-trivial loops. We show there are relations that hold across language families and additional relations that are family-specific. We then analyze the trees describing the merging structure of persistent connected components for languages in different language families and we show that they partly correlate to historical phylogenetic trees but with significant differences. We also show the existence of interesting non-trivial persistent first homology groups in various language families. We give examples where explicit generators for the persistent first homology can be identified, some of which appear to correspond to homoplasy phenomena, while others may have an explanation in terms of historical linguistics, corresponding to known cases of syntactic borrowing across different language subfamilies.

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Formal Syntax and Deep History

Cited by 16 publications

References 92 publications

At the boundaries of syntactic prehistory

At the boundaries of syntactic prehistory

Heat Kernel Analysis of Syntactic Structures

Topological Analysis of Syntactic Structures

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