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September 2009 - November 2025
Education
October 2012 - May 2017
March 2011 - December 2011
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Publications (15)
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...
Wave models of language change emerged during the latter half of the nineteenth century in Indo-European historical linguistics as an alternative to family tree models (see "Family Tree Model"). Their subsequent reception by the field, and their integration with comparative reconstruction has been marginal until recently; but advances in wave model...
We examine the typological position of the languages of Nepal among the languages of the world, considering a broad sample of morphosyntactic features. Following a computational analysis, we find that: most of the languages of Nepal occupy a fringe position; some languages of Nepal lie outside the range of variation of other South Asian languages;...
We examine a database of 3089 languages coded for 351 morphosyntactic features, including almost all of the morphosyntactic features found in The World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). We apply Factor Analysis of Mixed Data, and determine that the main dimensions of global morphological variation involve (1) word order in cla...
Polysemies, or “colexifications”, are of greatinterest in cognitive and historical linguistics, since meanings that are frequently expressed bythe same lexeme are likely to be conceptually similar, and lie along a common pathway of semantic change. We argue that these types of inferences can be more reliably drawn from polysemies of cognate sets (w...
Light Warlpiri is a newly emerged Australian mixed language that systematically combines nominal structure from Warlpiri (Australian, Pama-Nyungan) with verbal structure from Kriol (an English-lexified Creole) and English, with additional innovations in the verbal auxiliary system. Lexical items are drawn from both Warlpiri and the two English-lexi...
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...
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...
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...