Comparative and Historical Lingustics

En este trabajo se expone las dificultades que presenta el estudio y dilucidación gramatical del puquina del Rituale seu manuale Peruanum (Oré, 1607), el único vestigio textual de importancia que ha sobrevivido de aquella lengua. Esto queda mejor ejemplificado con el caso del estatus gramatical de los marcadores de persona poseedora. Una de las conclusiones a las que se llega es que los textos puquinas del Rituale permitirían postular e incluso hallar pruebas para dos afirmaciones contrarias respecto del estatus de dichos marcadores.

With the application of the Contrastive Hierarchy Theory, the contrastive features of preliterary Scandinavian vowels are here inferred from the interaction between targets and triggers for metaphonic fronting, rounding and breaking. One Proto-Scandinavian feature hierarchy is reconstructed for prominent syllables and another for non-prominent ones. The former hierarchy sustained contrasts that differed from the latter, including contrast for rounding and a preserved distinction between Pre-Germanic */i/ and */e/. A prominence system is reconstructed that predicts both the outcome of syncope and the distribution of the two vowel systems between syllables. The analysis neatly accounts for many notorious cruxes of umlaut and breaking that correlate with the prosodic position of the trigger, including the frequent absence of i-umlaut in light syllables.

Historical Linguistics studies language change over time. If a group of languages derives from changes to a common ancestor language (proto-language) then they are said to be related. Whenever there exists a lack of written records for an ancestor language, a relevant question in Historical Linguistics is to determine whether two languages are related.

The gold standard for finding these relationships is the Comparative Method. Despite the success of the Comparative Method in finding language relationships, it suffers from at least two limitations. First, the Comparative Method involves the manual comparison of various features from a group of languages. Second, the Comparative Method doesn't provide a numerical measure of evidence for how much the database under consideration corroborates an hypothesis.

Given the above limitations, the field of Computational Historical Linguistics is presented as a complement to the Comparative Method. This field has experienced a recent expansion with the adaptation of methods from biological phylogenetics. Nevertheless, there is debate whether the evolutionary models used in phylogenetics also incorporate valid linguistical assumptions.

In this thesis, I propose a new (probability) model for the evolution of the phonology of languages. A relevant innovation of this model is that it captures the regularity of sound changes. I also describe the software that I created in order to assist in incorporating into the model a linguist's expert knowledge. I show that the knowledge obtained in this way agrees with qualitative statements known to linguists. Finally, I present a new algorithm used to compute the probability of linguistic hypotheses regarding language relationships and the occurence of regular sound changes. The main problem that this algorithm overcomes is that it efficiently explores
the possible regular sound changes, mutations in languages that simultaneously affect several words. In order to overcome this challange, I present a new variant of Nested Sequential Monte Carlo that is used to explore the large space of language relationships and regular sound changes. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first algorithm that can perform joint inference on regular sound changes and evolutionary trees. I show that this algorithm is a special case of Sequential Importance Resampling.

Persistent and fundamental dissent continues to afflict research on preliterary Scandinavian regressive remote vowel assimilation known as " umlaut " and "breaking". To date, no analysis proposed has adequately accounted for the attested distribution of fronting, rounding nor vowel-induced breaking in the Old Scandinavian lexicon. It has been far from clear how (or even whether) these different kinds of assimilation are interrelated, causally or chronologically. The predicaments extend to the very basics of phonological analysis, such as the pivotal conditions, the mechanism(s) for change and the sequential chronologies, as well as to whether the changes were phonologically metaphonic in the first place – realised to improve perception – or rather driven by phonetic coarticulation (i.e. by easening of an articulatory effort). As a starting point chosen for two articles to appear in 2017, I have not deemed it to be adequate to address the theoretical issues, as has often been done, before examining the defective description of how front umlaut came to be distributed in the attested lexicon.

Abstract, errata and corrigenda to article: With the application of the Contrastive Hierarchy Theory, the contrastive features of preliterary Scandinavian vowels are here inferred from the interaction between targets and triggers for metaphonic fronting, rounding and breaking. One Proto-Scandinavian feature hierarchy is reconstructed for prominent syllables and another for non-prominent ones. The former hierarchy sustained contrasts that differed from the latter, including contrast for rounding and a preserved distinction between Pre-Germanic */i/ and */e/. A prominence system is reconstructed that predicts both the outcome of syncope and the distribution of the two vowel systems between syllables. The analysis neatly accounts for many notorious cruxes of umlaut and breaking that correlate with the prosodic position of the trigger, including the frequent absence of i-umlaut in light syllables. (see link,  has appeared in Nowele 70:2, September 2017)