Phylogenetics of Indo-European Language Families via an Algebro-Geometric Analysis of Their Syntactic Structures

Creators: Shu, Kevin; Ortegaray, Andrew; Berwick, Robert C.; Marcolli, Matilde

Abstract

Using Phylogenetic Algebraic Geometry, we analyze computationally the phylogenetic tree of subfamilies of the Indo-European language family, using data of syntactic structures. The two main sources of syntactic data are the SSWL database and Longobardi's recent data of syntactic parameters. We compute phylogenetic invariants and estimates of the Euclidean distance functions for two sets of Germanic languages, a set of Romance languages, a set of Slavic languages and a set of early Indo-European languages, and we compare the results with what is known through historical linguistics.

Additional Information

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. Received 30 April 2018; Revised 20 January 2019; Accepted 05 March 2021; Published 15 April 2021. The first and second author were partially supported by a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at Caltech. The last author is partially supported by NSF Grant DMS-1707882, NSERC Discovery Grant RGPIN-2018-04937, Accelerator Supplement Grant RGPAS-2018-522593, and by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. We are very grateful to the two anonymous referees for many very useful comments, corrections, and suggestions that greatly improved the paper.

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