The cultural evolution of complexity in linguistic structure

Abstract

In this work we compare, on the well explored domain of Indo-European languages, the phylogenetic outputs of three different sets of linguistic characters: traditional etymological judgments, a system for phonetic alignment of lists of cognates, and a set of values for generative syntactic parameters. The correlation and relative informativeness of distances and phylogenies generated by the three types of char- acters can thus be for the first time accurately evaluated, and the degree of success of the last two, innovative, alternatives to the classical comparative method can be so assessed