This article argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order
preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order …

Bayesian phylogenetic methods provide a set of tools to efficiently evaluate large linguistic
datasets by reconstructing phylogenies—family trees—that represent the history of language …

Languages of diverse structures and different families tend to share common patterns if they
are spoken in geographic proximity. This convergence is often explained by horizontal …

Although lexical borrowing is an important aspect of language evolution, there have been
few attempts to automate the identification of borrowings in lexical datasets. Moreover, none …

While language contact has so far been predominantly studied on the basis of detailed case
studies, the emergence of methods for phylogenetic reconstruction and automated word …

Here, we describe the process used to generate the tree sample used for inference in this
paper, as well as the details of the inference process used to infer evolutionary transition …

Grammaticalization is characterized by robust directional asymmetries (eg,). For instance,
body-part nominals develop into spatial adpositions, minimizers develop into negation …

Divergence-time estimation is one of the most important endeavors in historical linguistics.
Its importance is matched only by its difficulty. As Bayesian methods of divergence-time …

Feature stability, time and tempo of change, and the role of genealogy versus areality in
creating linguistic diversity are important issues in current computational research on …

The so-called 'Altaic'languages have been subject of debate for over 200 years. An array of
different data sets have been used to investigate the genealogical relationships between …