The fields of corpus and computational linguistics address fundamental goals – and challenge us to rethink the structure – of humanistic research. All work with historical languages is, in some sense, an exercise in corpus linguistics. The Greek and Latin Treebanks illustrate changes in intellectual practice. Linguistic annotation of historical corpora serves a different community and offers a ...

Computational phylogenetics is in the process of revolutionizing historical linguistics. Recent applications have shed new light on controversial issues, such as the location and time depth of language families and the dynamics of their spread. So far, these approaches have been limited to single-language families because they rely on a large body of expert cognacy judgments or grammatical clas...

Historical linguistics has as one of its main aims, the classification of languages into language families. The internal classification of languages within a language family is known as subgrouping. Subgrouping is concerned with the way daughter languages within a single family are related to one another and therefore, with the branching structure of the family tree (Campbell 2003). In recent y...

Riassunto: In linguistica storica occorrono metodi per quantificare la similarità fra lingue basandosi sul confronto di particolari liste di parole estratte dal vocabolario completo. In particolare, si pone il problema di valutare se il numero di elementi simili nelle due liste sia sufficientemente alto per rifiutare l’ipotesi di somiglianza casuale. Dopo aver illustrato un approccio già esiste...