Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history: a festschrift for Bob Blust, 397–410. This paper revisits a subgrouping hypothesis for the Rejang language of Sumatra presented in McGinn (2003), and offers a new hypothesis based on new evidence and on criticisms received from Austronesianists. The hypothesis to be defended is shown in (1). The subgrouping hypothesis shown in (1) above r...

1 Some historical background Linguists in the pre-generative period in American linguistics would happily have referred to themselves as empiricists. Foremost in their understanding of the term was the sense that empiricists were highly skeptical of what they viewed as metaphysical claims, and they shared the view that a rigorous method needed to be invoked in order to make scientific claims. T...

Baxter, William H. III 1992. A Handbook of old Chinese phonology. Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 64. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sagart Laurent 1999. The Roots of Old Chinese. Amsterdam: Benjamins Pulleyblank, E.G. 1962. ‘The consonantal system of Old Chinese’, Asia Major, 9: 58-114, 206-65 Pulleyblank, E.G. 1984. Middle Chinese: A Study in Historical Phonology, Vancouver: Universi...

1. Much of the debate surrounding the issue of syntactic reconstruction seems to me to be confounded by a certain degree of terminological (and perhaps conceptual) imprecision. In today’s talk I would like to present some aspects of the problem, walking through how they look to someone who makes the set of assumptions that I make regarding how historical linguistics works, what syntax is, what ...

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is the most comprehensive dataset available in machine-readable form for eighteenth-century printed texts. It plays a crucial role studies of language and it has vast potential corpus linguistics. At same time, an unbalanced that poses series different problems. The aim this paper to offer general overview ECCO linguistics by analysing, example, its ...

The presentation aims at presenting the LAUDATIO repository, a data repository for research data of historical corpus linguistics. It has a technical focus concerning the requirements that have been taken into consideration for the development of a repository infrastructure based on Fedora. Research data collections are expensive in terms of time, money and knowledge that is necessary to compil...

Ancient Greek clusters of nasal (N) plus voiceless unaspirated (T) or voiced stop (D), merged to ND in Middle Greek, yielding ND or D in different modern dialects. Impressionistic studies suggest that currently there is stylistic variation between D and ND in all dialects, with ND as the high variant. Our study reveals that age, not style, is the most important factor in ND/D variation, with sp...

Frequency counts are a measure of how much use a language makes of a linguistic unit, such as a phoneme or word. However, what is often important is not the units themselves, but the contrasts between them. A measure is therefore needed for how much use a language makes of a contrast, i.e. the functional load (FL) of the contrast. We generalize previous work in linguistics and speech recognitio...

We present an attempt to link the large amount of different concept lists which are used in the linguistic literature, ranging from Swadesh lists in historical linguistics to naming tests in clinical studies and psycholinguistics. This resource, ourConcepticon, links 30 222 concept labels from 160 conceptlists to 2495 concept sets. Each concept set is given a unique identifier, a unique label, ...

The present chapter frames Optimality-Theoretic approaches to phonological and morphosyntactic change in the context both of theoretical linguistics and of the questions asked in traditional historical linguistics. Previous traditional, standard generative and OT accounts are discussed, including principles of change invoked (e.g., Transparency Principle, Naturalness Condition, Neutral Ground H...