Growing a (Family) Tree: Evaluating the Na Dene-Yeniseian Language Family Hypothesis through Phylogeny
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2017
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
In historical linguistics, deep genealogies postulating far-flung"macro-families11 have
been at once fascinating, thought-provoking, and highly controversial because they reach
beyond the limits of standard reconstruction methods (Campbell 2004). Recent research
on one such family, the Dene-Yeniseian family, gives a new take by weaving linguistic
and anthropological arguments to envision the history of a language whose speakers
moved between late-Pleistocene North America and Eurasia (Kari & Potter 2010, Sicoli
& Holton 2014). In this thesis, I add to this small body of literature by modeling the
phylogeny of this family, taking into account both the relationships between these families)
modern languages and the evolutionary history behind them. I use the Bayesian
modeling software BEAST to infer the relationships within a set of 199 cross-linguistic
characters and produce a series of phylogenetic trees. I focus on maximizing interdisciplinary
approaches by factoring divergence dates for subgroups within each family drawn
from linguistic and anthropological research in order to, one, capture the set of calibrations
and rate of change that represents the data most effectively; and, two, see more
generally if and to what degree linguistic modeling is effective in capturing and reproducing
known calibrations. My results show that the findings of archaeological research may
be relatively effectively replicated through linguistic methods, indicating the potential
cooperation of these two disciplines when they intersect-at those moments in prehistory
when we can connect the migrations of language speakers and the divergence of languages.