Cross - Linguistic Explorations in Space, Time and Evolution
June 14-15, 2024
Tübingen, Germany
This workshop will delve into the intersection between computational phylogenetics as applied to historical linguistics, the evolution of language, and the spatial dynamics of language contact and diffusion. Bringing together researchers from diverse fields, we aim to facilitate a broad discussion and exchange of recent methodological advances, perspectives and findings within computational modelling of language history.
Recent years have seen an increase in research utilising computational methods from fields such as bioinformatics, machine learning, and geostatistics in order to shed light on the evolutionary dynamics of language, many of which have shown promising results. There has also been an increased interest in modelling language contact and spatial diffusion in order to infer areal dependencies between languages and to shed light on variation in the stability of morphosyntactic and phonological features. Such work has relevance for quantitative approaches to the inference of genealogical relationships between languages, as it can provide new insights on how to control for horizontal transmission.
The workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum for discussion on recent findings, methodological challenges, and future directions for research in this field.