Mathematical and Computational Linguistics Project N.4 Syntactic Phylogenetic Trees

1. Linguistic Phylogenetic Trees The reconstruction of phylogenetic trees of language families is one of the main problems in Historical Linguistics. In recent years, computational methods have been used, mostly borrowed from similar techniques in mathematical biology, see for instance the collection of papers in [1]. Mostly, the computational reconstructions of linguistic phylogenetic trees followed the original method developed in traditional Historical Linguistics, namely using lexical databases and cognate words. However, recently it was shown in [3] that syntactic parameters can also be efficiently used as data on the basis of which to construct phylogenetic trees. A general introduction to mathematical, computational and statistical methods for the construction of phylogenetic trees and graphs can be found in [2].