Ebert, Cathcart, Bickel and Widmer publish on a new corpus-based approach for studying word order change and reconstruction with Bayesion computational phylogenetic methods
Ebert, C., Cathcart, C., Bickel, B., & Widmer, P. (2025). Usage-based evolutionary models reveal context-specific word order change in Indo-European. Language Dynamics and Change, 15(1), 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-bja10039
Abstract: We investigate the rates of change in object-verb order in 46 sentences from 36 Indo-European languages extracted from a parallel corpus. A Gaussian mixture model reveals that the rates can be grouped into three components representing syntactic constructions with distinct diachronic dynamics. Contexts with nominal objects are relatively stable, whereas object-verb order in contexts with pronominal objects evolves fast. Complement clauses have a strong diachronic bias towards VO. Stochastic character mapping suggests a VO order of nominal objects and verb in Proto-Indo-European, while the fast rates in contexts with pronominal objects do not allow a reliable reconstruction of ancestral states.