Course materials for Michael Dunn's course at the 2018 LOT Winter School
Exercise 1: Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference with MrBayes
Datafile: Aslian28.nex
Exercise 2: Constraints and multiple partitions
Datafiles: new-britain-swadesh.nex, new-britain-structural.nex
Exercise 3: Ancestral State Reconstruction and the DISCRETE test
Datafiles: Aslian28+structure1.nex, Aslian28.nex.trees, Aslian-complexity.txt, Aslian-semantics.txt
Lecture 1. What is a possible language and how can we know?
Evans, Nicholas. 2016. Typology and coevolutionary linguistics. Linguistic Typology. 20, 3:501–520. link
Ladd, D. Robert, Seán G. Roberts, Dan Dediu. 2015. Correlational studies in typological and historical linguistics. Annual Review of Linguistics. 1, 1:221–241.
Lecture 2. Language variation in social and geographic environment
Gavin, Michael C., Carlos A. Botero, Claire Bowern, Robert K. Colwell, Michael Dunn, Robert R. Dunn, Russell D. Gray, Kathryn R. Kirby, Joe McCarter, Adam Powell, Thiago F. Rangel, John R. Stepp, Michelle Trautwein, Jennifer L. Verdolin, Gregor Yanega. 2013. Toward a Mechanistic Understanding of Linguistic Diversity. BioScience. 63, 7:524-535. link
Lupyan, Gary, Rick Dale. 2010. Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure. PLoS ONE. 5, 1:e8559. link
Lecture 3. Evolving variation
Dunn, Michael. 2015. Language phylogenies. In: Claire Bowern, Bethwyn Evans (editors) The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Routledge. 190-211 preprint
Dunn, Michael, Tonya Kim Dewey, Carlee Arnett, Thórhallur Eythórsson, Jóhanna Barðdal. 2017. Dative sickness: A phylogenetic analysis of argument structure evolution in Germanic. Language. 93, 1:e1-e22. link
Lecture 4. Galton, we have a problem
Dunn, Michael, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson, Russell D. Gray. 2011. Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature. 473:79-82. link
Blasi, Damián E., Søren Wichmann, Harald Hammarström, Peter F. Stadler, Morten H. Christiansen. 2016. Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. :201605782. link
Lecture 5. Integration
Greenhill, Simon J., Chieh-Hsi Wu, Xia Hua, Michael Dunn, Stephen C. Levinson, Russell D. Gray. 2017. Evolutionary dynamics of language systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. :201700388. link
Majid, Asifa, Fiona Jordan, Michael Dunn. 2015. Semantic systems in closely related languages. Language Sciences. 49:1-18. link
Food for thought
Maddison, Wayne P., Richard G. FitzJohn. 2015. The Unsolved Challenge to Phylogenetic Correlation Tests for Categorical Characters. Systematic Biology. 64, 1:127-136. link
Powell, Russell, Carlos Mariscal. 2015. Convergent evolution as natural experiment: the tape of life reconsidered. Interface Focus. 5, 6:20150040. link