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A Phylogenetic Model of the Evolution of Discrete Matrices for the Joint Inference of Lexical and Phonological Language Histories

Clarté, Grégoire; Ryder, Robin J. (2022), A Phylogenetic Model of the Evolution of Discrete Matrices for the Joint Inference of Lexical and Phonological Language Histories. https://basepub.dauphine.psl.eu/handle/123456789/23719

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Type
Document de travail / Working paper
Date
2022
Series title
Cahier de recherche CEREMADE, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL
Published in
Paris
Pages
37
Metadata
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Author(s)
Clarté, Grégoire
CEntre de REcherches en MAthématiques de la DEcision [CEREMADE]
Ryder, Robin J.
CEntre de REcherches en MAthématiques de la DEcision [CEREMADE]
Abstract (EN)
We propose a model of the evolution of a matrix along a phylogenetic tree, in which transformations affect either entire rows or columns of the matrix. This represents the change of both lexical and phonological aspects of linguistic data, by allowing for new words to appear and for systematic phonological changes to affect the entire vocabulary. We implement a Sequential Monte Carlo method to sample from the posterior distribution, and infer jointly the phylogeny, model parameters, and latent variables representing cognate births and phonological transformations. We successfully apply this method to synthetic and real data of moderate size.
Subjects / Keywords
Bayesian inference; Historical linguistics; Sequential Monte Carlo; Phylogenetics