Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology

Abstract

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Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora

“…Diachronic datasets (e.g. those based on the archaeological record, but similarly, corpora) only provide sparse, aggregated frequency information, which may be the reflection of a variety of neutral or selective transmission processes at the individual level (Premo 2014;Crema, Kandler & Shennan 2016;Kandler, Wilder & Fortunato 2017;Kandler & Crema 2019). Since these underlying processes cannot be directly observed (particularly in prehistoric data), Kandler, Wilder & Fortunato (2017) suggest shifting the focus from identifying the single individual-level process that likely produced the observed data -to excluding those that likely did not.…”

“…It is a reasonable hypothesis that, given adequately large and representative samples of language use over time (i.e., corpora), signatures of selection should be inferable from the usage data alone. This idea has recently been explored in a number of works (Hahn & Bentley 2003;Bentley 2008;Reali & Griffiths 2010;Blythe 2012;Sindi & Dale 2016;Amato et al 2018), and has been also applied to domains of cumulative cultural evolution beyond language (Kandler, Wilder & Fortunato 2017;Kandler & Crema 2019). One of the more ambitious attempts is that of Newberry et al (2017), who employ a standard method borrowed from the field of population genetics, which also deals with the inference of selection in a population and the assessment of drift in evolution.…”