Automated methods for the investigation of language contact, with a focus on lexical borrowing

Abstract

Abstract While language contact has so far been predominantly studied on the basis of detailed case studies, the emergence of methods for phylogenetic reconstruction and automated word comparison—as a result of the recent quantitative turn in historical linguistics—has also resulted in new proposals to study language contact situations by means of automated approaches. This study provides a concise introduction to the most important approaches, which have been proposed in the past, presenting methods that use (A) phylogenetic networks to detect reticulation events during language history, (B) sequence comparison methods in order to identify borrowings in multilingual datasets, and (C) arguments for the borrowability of shared traits to decide if traits have been borrowed or inherited. While the overview focuses on approaches dealing with lexical borrowing, questions of general contact inference will also be discussed where applicable.

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