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Introduction
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September 2009 - November 2025
Education
October 2012 - May 2017
March 2011 - December 2011
Publications
Publications (10)
When searching for language universals in linguistic typology, it is important to choose a sample of the world’s languages that is representative of many different linguistic areas; otherwise, one risks mistaking properties that have spread by contact or inheritance for genuine universal tendencies in human language. In order to avoid this problem,...
As Virtual Reality emerges as an accessible technology, researchers have begun to experiment with its potential for data visualisation. In this poster we will highlight some conceptual issues around using VR and other immersive 3D technologies to explore the morphosyntactic data from the World Phonotactics Database (Donohue et al 2013), which is an...
Since the beginnings of historical linguistics, the family tree has been the most widely accepted model for representing historical relations between languages. While this sort of representation is easy to grasp, and allows for a simple, attractive account of the development of a language family, the assumptions made by the tree model are applicabl...
Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström. 2019. Problems with, and alternatives to, the tree model in historical linguistics. In Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström (eds), Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model. Special issue of Journal of Historical Linguistics 9/1: 1–8.
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There are i...
There are important reasons to be sceptical of the accuracy and usefulness of the family-tree model in historical linguistics. That model assumes that every linguistic innovation applies to a language considered as an undifferentiated whole, a point with no “width”. But this assumption makes it impossible to use a tree to model the partial diffusio...
Siva Kalyan & Alexandre François. 2019. When the waves meet the trees: A response to Jacques & List. In Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström (eds), Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model. Special issue of Journal of Historical Linguistics 9/1: 167–176.
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This special issue of the _Journal of Hist...
One of the main advantages of cognitive linguistics (and in particular Cognitive Grammar) over other approaches to the study of language structure is the fact that every descriptive construct is defined in psychological terms. This means, ideally, that any cognitive linguistic description of a word or grammatical construction constitutes a hypothes...
Usage-based models of language propose that the acceptability of an element in a constructional slot is determined by its similarity to attested fillers of that slot (Bybee 2010, ch. 4). However, Ambridge and Goldberg (2008) find that the acceptability of a long-distance-dependency (LDD) question does not correlate with the judged similarity of the...
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Projects (2)
Historical Glottometry (HG) is a quantitative, non-cladistic approach to language subgrouping that draws on dialectology and social-network analysis. The aim of HG is to provide a representation of language genealogy in which (1) subgroups are defined by exclusively-shared innovations (following the Comparative Method); (2) subgroups are allowed to intersect (as expected under the Wave model); (3) the “strength” of each subgroup is measured on a continuous scale.
See also https://hg.hypotheses.org/
