Phylogenetics of Indo-European Language families via an Algebro-Geometric Analysis of their Syntactic Structures
This work addresses the challenge of understanding language evolution for linguists and computational biologists, but it appears incremental as it applies an existing method to new linguistic data.
The authors tackled the problem of reconstructing the phylogenetic tree of Indo-European language families by analyzing syntactic structures using Phylogenetic Algebraic Geometry, resulting in computed phylogenetic invariants and likelihood functions for Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and early Indo-European languages, with comparisons to historical linguistics.
Using Phylogenetic Algebraic Geometry, we analyze computationally the phylogenetic tree of subfamilies of the Indo-European language family, using data of syntactic structures. The two main sources of syntactic data are the SSWL database and Longobardi's recent data of syntactic parameters. We compute phylogenetic invariants and likelihood functions for two sets of Germanic languages, a set of Romance languages, a set of Slavic languages and a set of early Indo-European languages, and we compare the results with what is known through historical linguistics.