A Bayesian analysis of linguistic areas in the Americas
- Date: 20 March 2025, 15:15
- Location: English Park, 9-3042
- Type: Lecture, Seminar
- Lecturer: Natalia Chousou-Polydouri
- Web page
- Organiser: WoGEL
- Contact person: Johan Ulrik Nielsen
Natalia Chousou-Polydouri (Institute of Mediterranean Studies (IMS; FORTH), Crete) present a talk for WoGEL (Working Group of General Linguistics) about using Bayesian analysis to identify language areas in the Americas.
Abstract: In this talk, I will present a Bayesian analysis which aims to discover linguistic areas in the Americas, taking into account multiple independent typological features.
We use the Areal Typology of Languages of the Americas (ATLAs) database, a fine-grained survey of 265 features across 17 domains for over 200 American languages. An additional 100 languages from other areas of the world are used to derive an empirical universal prior for the analysis.
For the quantitative analysis, we use a Bayesian mixture model, sBayes (Ranacher et al., 2021), which controls for confounding effects due to inheritance and universal preference.
Our results confirm a number of proposed linguistic areas in both North and South America, such as the Andes, the Gran Chaco, and the Pacific Northwest, and also lend support to the debated Amazonian area and a new area in the North American Southwest (to the exclusion of the Pueblo peoples). We report on the linguistic features that typify each area, revealing historical layers of contact, and contextualize our findings to demographic dynamics as reconstructed by genetic and archaeological evidence.