Re: New Methodology on Analysis of Language Change

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 23:03:59 GMT, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> Thanks again [for the data excerpts]. (You're spending an awful lot of
> time on something worth nothing.)
>
> Yep, the methodology is identical to Ringe et al.'s (yet I didn't notice
> anything by that team in their references).
>
> And their features are AFAICT entirely typological. You could do the
> chart for 5000 languages and come up with a classification that had
> nothing whatsoever to do with reality.
>
> In fact, they don't even claim to have tested it by using it either for
> well-understood families, say IE, or for a random selection of
> languages!
>
> Once again: Why does *Science* not use peer review for linguistics
> articles?

I posted it to get feedback and clarification from you and others here on
the methodology employed. Ringe seems to have done the same thing with
Indo-European -- only he used lexicology and not typology. I guess I'm
doing it also to try to work through the way they did it in my own mind.
Except that I'm still baffled because I don't understand anything about
cladistics.

Apparently, Dunn et al. did "test" their methods against that Austronesian
languages in the same area Ross Clark mentioned (whose relatedness and
classifications are supposedly well-known) and the results supposedly
correlated.

In the "Supporting Materials" posted as a companion to the article, things
seem to have been done in the following way:

1. A questionnaire was compiled using the 125 typological factoids and
each language was checked for the presence or non-presence of each factoid
by linguists "with fieldwork expertise in the languages" or "from published
and unpublished sources".

2. "Trees were then generated for each set of data using maximum parsimony
methods, using the heuristic algorithm with taxa randomly reordered 100
times over 10,000 bootstrapped datasets. The concensus tree from this
bootstrap data provides us with an approximation of the relationships found
in the dataset, and a measure of the robustness of particular hypothesized
relationships. The level of homoplasy (convergent features independently
innovated in different branches of the family tree) in the data is
realtively high compared to biological genetic systems, caused by the
relatively high (and probably variable) rate of change in languages, and
because there is a level of functional interdependence in grammatical
systems. Furthermore, the structural features used in the analysis are
necessarily defined coarsely: more narrowly definded categories would
provide higher apparent levels of support for clusterings of taxa, but this
would be determined by the more-or-less arbitrary selection of the
categories coded. Because of the relatively high level of homoplasy found
in linguistic structural data, consensus trees are preferred to optimal
trees as the basis for our phylogenetic hypotheses. To reduce the effect
of homoplasy we used an a posteriori weighting of traits showing
phylogenetic reliability; weights were derived from the rescaled
consistency index value of each trait determined on the initial run"

The above paragraph baffles me completely. I have no idea what is being
said. Somehow, trees were derived. That's all I understand.

The fact that Julian Scaff (our famous postmodernist) might have been
involved in computer work at Nijmegen makes me nervous. The above-quoted
second paragraph sounds like computer-generated postmodernistic drivel to
me. Gobbledegook. I am totally lost.

Joe Murphy
Boy Linguist



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