In this presentation, LUCDH Assistant Professor Jelena Prokic will discuss quantitative approaches to intriguing and long-standing questions on language change.
Languages change constantly and scholarly people have already observed this in ancient times. While back then language change was considered a 'decay,' or 'corruption of a holy speech', modern linguistics see it as a fact, i.e., an everlasting process that does not lead to a 'better' or 'worse' languages, but tries to explain how and why languages change. Findings about language change are important for linguistic theory in general, but also for understanding of human cognition, human society and history. In the past two centuries language change has systematically been studied in several linguistic disciplines, but it is still not fully understood why languages change and what the dynamics of language change are.
Quantitative approaches are an attempt to use exact methods from machine learning and computational phylogenetics to study relatedness between language varieties, as well as the relationship between language history and other aspects of human history, such as demography or social structure. Dr. Prokic will present several case studies and address the benefits and problems of using quantitative methods in this type of research.
