Pama-Nyungan Phylogenetics and Beyond Claire Bowern, Yale University

Developing a phylogeny of Pama-Nyungan o The Data(base) o Bowern and Atkinson’s (2012) phylogeny o Second generation questions: Extending the analysis: o Bowern and Atkinson’s ‘problem’ subgroups o Unidentified languages o Unity of Pama-Nyungan within Australia: o Exploratory qualitative phylogenetics o Conclusions

Pama-Nyungan

Why Australia? o Natural laboratory for language change o Linguistically diverse: large number of languages and families o Only continent without agriculture before the Colonial period o Ecologically diverse o Claimed to be exceptional Claims that traditional methods don’t work: but based on universals of perception, production, and human interaction Estimates for age of Pama-Nyungan range 4,000-40,000 years 20+ primary subgroups is very unusual o Many outstanding questions; little previous work; great test case for phylogenetic methods

Database (image source: picturespider.com)

The CHIRILA database (Bowern submitted) o 775,000 lexical items o 343 Pama-Nyungan languages; doculects o 56 Non-Pama-Nyungan languages, 15+ families o The entire corpus of Tasmanian o Grammatical features for 90 languages o Morphology collection in progress o Data collection, curation, and processing is still very much in progress. o First data release this Fall. o Aim complete lexical records for Australia

Database Structure See further Bowern (submitted)

Bowern and Atkinson’s Phylogeny Language, 82.4

Problem: The Pama-Nyungan ‘Rake’ O’Grady, Voegelin & Voegelin (1965), Dixon (1980, 2002), Hercus (1994), Bowern & Koch (2004), etc. o Missing data? o Too many loans? o Haven’t looked hard enough? o Or indicative of how hunter- gatherer languages expand?

Loans aren’t the problem

Research Questions: 1.Can we recover the uncontroversial lower-level groupings? [testing internal validity of model] 2.What higher-level groupings do we reconstruct? 3.What level of support do they have?

Methods/Data o 194 Languages o 189 words of basic vocabulary, coded for cognacy o Stochastic Dollo model [vs CTMC and Covarion] o Relaxed clock [root fixed at 10,000 years/calibration points]

1) Subgroup recovery o Tracked 28 subgroups; recovered 24: o Problems: 4 groups appear as paraphyletic Western Torres (Mabuiag) has high replacement levels; Paman has missing data and was under- sampled. Ngumpin-Yapa and Yardli have very high loan levels; In addition, Yardli has high levels of missing data;

2) and 3): Higher level groups

Next stages ( ): o Sample undersampled areas [Paman, Kulin] o Extend cognate coding to additional widespread, well attested forms o Study the effects of loans on coding [recoding solves Ngumpin, but so does adding more cognates and langs]. o Look at language and (phylo)geography [in progress] o Use the tree to probe unidentified wordlists. o Examine the unity of Pama-Nyungan, by coding relatives and adjacent families [Garrwan, Tangkic, Nyulnyulan, Worrorran] o Use the tree in ancestral state reconstruction [cf. Zhou and Bowern 2015, Bowern et al 2013, etc].

Extensions and Issues

Cognate Coding

More languages and cognate coding o Added 105 languages o Added 20 cognates (body parts, kin terms, ‘camp’, ‘hill’) o Numerous minor coding changes, updating current knowledge, typographical errors, etc o This solved the lower level Western Torres, Paman and Karnic (Yardli) problems. That is, we now recover all groups as per established classifications as monophyletic. o Implication: Even within ‘basic vocabulary’, the wordlist matters. This needs further investigation.

Two subsets of basic vocab

Moving beyond ‘Swadesh’ lists o Lexical replacement is a model of semantic change. o We don’t have very good models of lexical semantic change (though cf. Urban [2014] for a start). o BUT, we do know that there are homologous changes in body parts (Wilkins 1996), and body parts are core basic vocabulary; cf also Bowern et al (2013) on kinship vocab. o We want low-loan, low-homoplasy data, not just ‘slow’ data (cf. Round [yesterday]; Dellert and Buch [this morning]) o diagnosing family-level relationships is not the same as inferring internal tree structure

Language and Geography

Language and Geography: o Core-periphery model in language change: o Centers of (dialect) areas are innovative; innovations spread to periphery

Patterns of Change in Space

How many languages?

Unidentified languages/wordlists o Poorly attested materials: do they belong to languages we already know about? o Or are there additional languages not previously identified in classifications? o Can we classify languages with doubtful subgroup affiliation? o Solution: code for cognacy and investigate phylogenetically o Relevant both for science and for revitalization/reclamation efforts

Unidentified Languages/Wordlists o Most wordlists group closely with already coded varieties

Bigambal: Bandjalangic or Central NSW?

How many languages? o Previous estimates: c languages [Dixon 1980, 2002, O’Grady, Voegelin and Voegelin 1966, Wurm 1972, Walsh 1991, 1997, etc] o Walsh (1997) notes problems with reconciling the figure of 250 languages with per language population estimates. o Method here: counting ‘languages’ as the reference names used in the database (that is, names that are used to group sources together that experts say belong to the same language).

More languages than we thought o 397 Australian Languages o 303 Pama-Nyungan o 94 non-Pama-Nyungan o 20 non-Pama-Nyungan families o 30 Pama-Nyungan subgroups o Sources of discrepancy: under-counting (e.g. in Yolŋu, Paman, Giimbiyu) treating badly attested varieties as dialects of better known varieties multiple (different) languages with the same name (e.g. Kungkari, Dharawal, Yugambeh/-bal)

Is Pama-Nyungan monophyletic?

Unity of Pama-Nyungan o Pama-Nyungan’s nearest relatives: Garrwan Tangkic o Classed as Pama-Nyungan in early classifications on the basis of typology (eg OVV65) o Reclassified in Blake (1988) on their pronouns

Outgroups are ‘Western’

‘Outgroups’ are ‘Western’

Conclusions

Ten years ago… o no Pama-Nyungan tree o no consensus on how Pama-Nyungan subgroups are related o no data repository o and therefore, no easy way to study change in Australia

Now… o Much better idea of macro-groupings, but still substantial issues about how they might fit together. the data matters the model matters [not insoluble, just work for the future] o Much better idea of the extent of the diversity on the continent More than we thought… o CHIRILA database, access to extensive data o New ways to investigate language in space, questions of language diversification in space o Need for further investigation of the internal composition of Pama-Nyungan.

Acknowledgments o NSF grants BCS and BCS o The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who have given permission for their languages to be included in the database, and made data available. o The 100+ linguists who have given permission for their work to be included in the database. o The 50+ research students (undergraduates and graduates) who have been involved in the project since 2007, at Rice Univ. and Yale. o Russell, who got me interested in this approach.