Claire Bowern, of Yale University gave the department colloquium on Friday April 29th. An abstract of her talk, Computational Pylogenetics and Australian Languages, follows.
I present the first proposal for the internal subgrouping and higher order structure of the Pama-Nyungan family of Australian languages. Previous work has identified more than 25 primary subgroups in the family, with little indication of how these groups might fit together. Some work has assumed that reconstruction of higher nodes in the tree would be impossible, either because extensive internal borrowing has obscured more remote relations, or because relevant languages are not sufficiently well attested. Here I show that the Pama-Nyungan tree has considerable internal structure, and that language contact and missing data do not impede reconstruction unduly. This work shows the power of combining historical reconstruction with computational approaches to phylogenetic inference and provides an illustration of the way in which language can give us new insights into unsolved problems in prehistory.
