Contrasting Vertical and Horizontal Transmission of Typological Features

Linguistic typology provides features that have a potential of uncovering deep phylogenetic relations among the world’s languages. One of the key challenges in using typological features for phylogenetic inference is that horizontal (spatial) transmission obscures vertical (phylogenetic) signals. In this paper, we characterize typological features with respect to the relative strength of vertical and horizontal transmission. To do this, we first construct (1) a spatial neighbor graph of languages and (2) a phylogenetic neighbor graph by collapsing known language families. We then develop an autologistic model that predicts a feature’s distribution from these two graphs. In the experiments, we managed to separate vertically and/or horizontally stable features from unstable ones, and the results are largely consistent with previous findings.