Publications

Challenges of sampling and how phylogenetic comparative methods help: With a case study of the Pama-Nyungan laminal contrast

Published in Linguistic Typology, 2022

Phylogenetic methods are shrouded in a little mystery for many linguists. Yet the path that led to their discovery in comparative biology is so similar to the methodological history of balanced sampling, that it is only an accident of history that they were not discovered by a typologist. Here we clarify the essential logic behind phylogenetic comparative methods and their fundamental relatedness to a deep intellectual tradition focussed on sampling.

Recommended citation: Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. & Erich R. Round. 2022. Challenges of sampling and how phylogenetic comparative methods help: With a case study of the Pama-Nyungan laminal contrast. Linguistic Typology. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2021-0025 https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2021-0025

Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics

Published in Diachronica, 2021

Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data – in this instance, statistical phonotactics.

Recommended citation: Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L., Claire Bowern & Erich R. Round. 2021. Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics. Diachronica. 38(2). pp. 210–258. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20004.mac

Re-evaluating phoneme frequencies

Published in Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. In the wake of a major debate around power-law hypotheses and the unreliability of earlier methods of evaluating them, we re-evaluate the distributions claimed to characterize phoneme frequencies.

Recommended citation: Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. & Erich R. Round. 2020. Re-evaluating phoneme frequencies. Frontiers in Psychology 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.570895

Automated parsing of interlinear glossed text from page images of grammatical descriptions

Published in Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC-2020), 2020

We demonstrate fundamental viability for a technology that can assist in making a large number of linguistic data sources machine readable: the automated identification and parsing of interlinear glossed text from scanned page images.

Recommended citation: Round, Erich R., T. Mark Ellison, Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes, Sacha Beniamine. 2020. Automated parsing of interlinear glossed text from page images of grammatical descriptions. Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC-2020), 2871--2876. Marseille, France: European Languages Resources Association. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.lrec-1.351/

High-definition phonotactics reflect linguistic pasts

Published in Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics (QITL-6), 2015

Typological datasets for quantitative historicallinguistic inquiry are growing in breadth, but a challenge is also to increase their depth, since advanced methods often ideally require many hundreds of traits per language.

Recommended citation: Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. & Erich R. Round. 2015. High-definition phonotactics reflect linguistic pasts. Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics (QITL-6). Tübingen: University of Tübingen. https://doi.org/10.15496/publikation-8609