Historical linguistics in Australia: trees, networks and their implications.
This paper presents an overview of the current state of historical linguistics in Australian languages. Australian languages have been important in theoretical debates about the nature of language change and the possibilities for reconstruction and classification in areas of intensive diffusion. Here are summarized the most important outstanding questions for Australian linguistic prehistory; I also present a case study of the Karnic subgroup of Pama-Nyungan, which illustrates the problems for classification in Australian languages and potential approaches using phylogenetic methods.
Department of Linguistics, 370 Temple Street, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA. claire.bowern@yale.edu
Claire
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Bowern
D001315:Australia; D003468:Cultural Evolution; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D049690:History, Ancient; D049691:History, Medieval; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language / Q000266:history*; D008037:Linguistics; D008962:Models, Theoretical