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Bringing the advances of theoretical linguistics to the study of language change in a systematic way, this innovative textbook demonstrates the mutual relevance of historical linguistics and contemporary linguistics. Numerous case studies throughout the book show both that theoretical linguistics can be used to solve problems where traditional approaches to historical linguistics have failed to produce satisfying results, and that the results of historical research can have an impact on theory. The book first explains the nature of human language and the sources of language change in broad terms. It then focuses on different types of language change from contemporary viewpoints, before exploring comparative reconstruction - the most spectacular success of traditional historical linguistics - and the problems inherent in trying to devise new methods for linguistic comparison. Positioned at the cutting edge of the field, the book argues that this approach can and should lead to the re-integration of historical linguistics as one of the core areas in the study of language.

In this article we extend the model of language evolution exemplified in Ringe et al. 2002, which recovers phylogenetic trees optimized according to a criterion of weighted maximum compatibility, to include cases in which languages remain in contact and trade linguistic material as they evolve. We describe our analysis of an Indo-European (IE) dataset (originally assembled by Ringe and Taylor) based on this new model. Our study shows that this new model fits the IE family well and suggests that the early evolution of IE involved only limited contact between distinct lineages. Furthermore, the candidate histories we obtain appear to be consistent with archaeological findings, which suggests that this method may be of practical use. The case at hand provides no opportunity to explore the problem of conflict between network optimization criteria; that problem must be left to future research.

Standard methodology suggests that we reject the null hypothesis (accidental resemblance) and offer a more plausible explanation for the observed similarities. Since the known typology of language contacts does not speak in favor of explaining the observed Indo-Uralic matches as old lexical borrowings, the optimal explanation is seen in the hypothesis of an Indo-Uralic genetic relationship, with the 7 matching pairs in question representing archaic retentions, left over from the original Indo-Uralic protolanguage. 1. [...]this positive probabilistic result is mostly based on coincidences that are unlikely to reflect true etymological sound correspondences, such as IE *d - Finno-Ugric *p, etc.

We describe the reconstruction of a phylogeny for a set of taxa, with a character-based cladistics approach, in a declarative knowledge representation formalism, and show how to use computational methods of answer set programming to generate conjectures about the evolution of the given taxa. We have applied this computational method in two domains: historical analysis of languages and historical analysis of parasite-host systems. In particular, using this method, we have computed some plausible phylogenies for Chinese dialects, for Indo-European language groups, and for Alcataenia species. Some of these plausible phylogenies are different from the ones computed by other software. Using this method, we can easily describe domain-specific information (e.g., temporal and geographical constraints), and thus prevent the reconstruction of some phylogenies that are not plausible.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The concept of a temporal phylogenetic network is a mathematical model of evolution of a family of natural languages. It takes into account the fact that languages can trade their characteristics with each other when linguistic communities are in contact, and also that a contact is only possible when the languages are spoken at the same time. We show how computational methods of answer set programming and constraint logic programming can be used to generate plausible conjectures about contacts between prehistoric linguistic communities, and illustrate our approach by applying it to the evolutionary history of Indo-European languages.

“Internal reconstruction” (IR) is the exploitation of patterns in the synchronic grammar of a single language or dialect to recover information about its prehistory. The methods of IR are generally less reliable than the standard methods of comparative reconstruction (CR; see Rankin, this volume) for the following reasons.

In a critical commentary on Peter Forster & Alfred Toth's \"Toward a Phylogenetic Chronology of Ancient Gaulish, Celtic, and Indo-European\" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2003, 100, 9079-9084) & the accompanying online appendix & web tutorial, it is shown that the new computational method proposed by Forster & Toth as a tool for the dating of prehistoric linguistic speciation is not only scientifically inadequate but rejects diachronic linguistic science. Every part of Forster & Toth's project, including data selection & processing, is found to contain serious errors; eg, diversity among the Continental Celtic languages is ignored, their crucial data set of characters is drawn from bilingual & independent Celtic & Latin texts that are wrongly assumed to be one-to-one translations, & their linguistic analysis includes fatal inconsistency of judgment in the grouping of characters by superficial similarities. Forster & Toth assume a uniform clock for vocabulary replacement & operate with a small data set that easily admits chance factors, & the Hamming distances with which their computational method operates cannot recover true evolutionary distances from lexical characters & therefore cannot test for deviation from a lexical clock. 33 References. J. Hitchcock