Historical and Areal Linguistics

Topics in historical Chumash grammar

Kathryn Klar
1977

Advisor: Madison Beeler

Northern Paiute Historical Grammar

Michael Nichols
1974

Advisor: Mary R. Haas

The Indo-Hittite hypothesis

Joel Erickson
1971

Advisor: Madison Beeler

Proto-Carib phonology

Victor Girard
1971

Advisor: Wallace L. Chafe

Phonological history of Wu

William Ballard
1969

Advisor: William Wang

Proto-Kra

Weera Ostapirat
1999

Advisor: James Matisoff

Achinese historical phonology

Jesse Sawyer
1959

Advisor: C. Douglas Chrétien

New World Mennonite Low German: An Investigating of Changes in Progress

Roslyn C. Burns
2016

Adivsor: Gary Holland

A Bayesian Phylogenetic Classification of Tupí-Guaraní

Lev Michael
Natalia Chousou-Polydouri
Keith Bartolomei
Erin Donnelly
Vivian Wauters
Sérgio Meira
Zachary O'Hagan
2015

This paper presents an internal classification of Tupí-Guaraní based on lexical data from 30 Tupí-Guaraní languages and 2 non-Tupí-Guaraní Tupian languages, Awetí and Mawé. A Bayesian phylogenetic analysis using a generalized binary cognate gain and loss model was carried out on a character table based on the binary coding of cognate sets, which were formed with attention to semantic shift. The classification shows greater internal structure than previous ones, but is congruent with them in several ways.

A test of coding procedures for lexical data with Tupí-Guaraní and Chapacuran languages

Natalia Chousou-Polydouri
Joshua Birchall
Sérgio Meira
Zachary O’Hagan
Lev Michael
2016

Recent phylogenetic studies in historical linguistics have focused on lexical data. However, the way that such data are coded into characters for phylogenetic analysis has been approached in different ways, without investigating how coding methods may affect the results. In this paper, we compare three different coding methods for lexical data (multistate meaning-based characters, binary root-meaning characters, and binary cognate characters) in a Bayesian framework, using data from the Tupí-Guaraní and Chapacuran language families as case studies. We show that, contrary to prior...