Gabriele Rigon, A quantitative approach to the study of syntactic evolution.
Abstract
In this dissertation a quantitative approach to the study of syntactic evolution is adopted with the
goal of illustrating its applicability, its effectiveness and its limits. In particular, the investigation is
intended to test diverse quantitative methods of analysis (i.e. phylogenetic procedures) originally
designed within molecular biology and population genetics on a syntactic comparative dataset, with
the objective of reconstructing hypotheses regarding genealogical and areal relationships between
languages and of evaluating them in light of traditional descriptions of historical linguistics.
On the whole, the quantitative analyses appear to provide good indications of diverse facts: That
phylogenetic techniques are to a large extent effectively applicable to the study of syntactic
evolution, that the parametric comparison may successfully help shedding light on both short- and
long-range genealogical relationships, and that traces of proper genealogical relatedness are likely
to be preserved (and to be recoverable despite homoplasy, i.e. parallel evolution and contact) at the
level of language “macro-variation”.