Phylogene)c compara)ve analysis: an introduc)on and prac)cal Annemarie Verkerk University of Reading Lille 23-­‐05-­‐2014 A history of the Slavic languages, Čelakovský (1853: 3) what can we do with phylogenies? “...coupled with data on the characteris)cs, behaviours, and lifestyles of species, phylogenies can be used to infer the historical evolu5onary processes that must have existed in the past, given the pa9erns of diversity seen in the present. [...] compara)ve sta)s)cal methods can be used to discover -­‐ in a manner that might be described as ‘sta)s)cal palaeontology’ -­‐ the nature of the evolu)onary processes as they advanced along what would become the branches of the phylogene)c tree.” Pagel (1997: 331) evolu8onary processes...? 1. direc)on and order of evolu)onary change homelands, spa8al migra8on pa<erns 2. nature of evolu)onary processes expansions, borrowing, punctua8on, treeness 3. da)ng divergence events popula8on splits, feature divergence 4. ancestral character states ‘virtual archeology’, sequen8al models 5. correla)ons between features (coevolu)on) word order dependencies 6. rates of evolu)on speed of lexical and typological change why use phylogene8c compara8ve methods? ?
why use phylogene8c compara8ve methods? “...Francis Galton realized as early as 1889 that cultures cannot be treated as independent for purposes of inves)ga)ng cross-­‐
cultural trends. The historical pa\erns of relatedness among socie)es mean that they cannot be assumed to have evolved or acquired their par5cular characteris5cs independently. [...] the validity of compara)ve methods for anthropology depends upon correctly coun)ng independent instances of cultural change. Independent instances of cultural change, in turn, cannot be iden)fied without the construc5on of a phylogeny showing the pa9erns of hierarchical descent of the cultures being studied.” Mace and Pagel (1994: 549-­‐550, 551) what are phylogene8c compara8ve methods? A set of sta)s)cal tools that: 1. use informa)on from across different languages; 2. takes into account their genealogical rela)onships in order to: 3. infer something about the evolu)on or distribu)on of the characteris)cs of those languages. Jordan (2010) Parsimony Maximum Likelihood Bayesian Parsimony Maximum Likelihood Bayesian Tutorial method: Maximum Likelihood in BayesTraits (Pagel and Meade 2013) data: Austronesian languages Part 1: data on affixing (whether or not a language uses affixes on its verbs or nouns) Part 2: data on plural marking systems and phylogene)c distance Thank you for listening... ...and let’s do some phylogene)cs!