Response Paper: Are Biological Methods Suitable for Analysing Language Change?

PhD student Andres Karjus, who is based in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and supervised by Professor Kenny Smith, is the lead author on a forthcoming response paper to appear in Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics. 

Karjus and his co-authors (Richard A. Blythe, Simon Kirby, and Kenny Smith) titled their paper ‘Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora’, which responds to Newberry and colleagues’ article published in Nature in 2017, titled ‘Detecting evolutionary forces in language change’. 

Newberry and colleagues reported on using methods from evolutionary biology in linguistics research, to detect selection in the history of English using the Corpus of Historical American English and the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English, the latter of which represents language use as far back as the times of Middle English.  

Karjus and his co-authors argue that researchers should tread carefully when importing techniques from biology for use in linguistics, highlighting fundamental differences between genetic and linguistic data, and the unavoidable researcher degrees of freedom in the proposed methodology. The research documented in Karjus’ paper also demonstrates the usefulness of simulations for evaluating methods newly applied to linguistics research.