Vertical and lateral aspects of Chinese dialect history

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Johann-Mattis List
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Asian Studies ; Bioinformatics and Theoretical Biology
• Term: from 2014 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 261553824

Despite a long tradition of research, only little is known about the origin and diversification of the Chinese dialects. The reason for this is the specific sociolinguistic situation in China, where - for over two thousand years - countless, mostly mutually unintelligible linguistic varieties have been developing under the roof of a common culture and a common writing system. Under the influence of centripetal forces caused by varying prestige languages, centrifugal forces resulting from geographical distance, and different waves of migrations, a language family hase emerged whose linguistic divergence resembles that of the Romance languages, but whose history is so complex and intertwined that it seems impossible to describe it by means of a classical family tree. This is also reflected in traditional Chinese dialectology which confines itself to divide the Chinese dialects into static groups without trying to develop hypotheses as to how these groups have emerged. One of the biggest problems in this context is the distinction of inherited (vertical) and borrowed (lateral) features, which is immensely aggravated by the extensive language contact in China. Along with the recent quantitative turn in historical linguistics, many methods from bioinformatics were applied to linguistic problems. Most new methods limit themselves to the reconstruction of language trees. Implicitly, they draw a parallel between language evolution and the mostly tree-like evolution of animals and plants. Recent research, however, has shown that it may be more appropriate to resort to biological network approaches that have been developed to study bacterial evolution. Since lateral gene transfer plays a similarly important role in bacterial evolution as borrowing does in language development, biological network approaches provide both formal means to model vertical and lateral aspects of language history, and different methods to distinguish them from each other. Based on interdisciplinary cooperation with biologists and sinologists from Paris, this research project will use network methods to explore vertical and lateral aspects of Chinese dialect history in detail. Existing methods will be further refined, adapted to linguistic needs, and applied to a large lexical database of Chinese dialects, which will be created specifically for this purpose. In this way, the project will contribute to Chinese dialect classification in particular, and to quantitative modeling of language history in general.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: France
• Hosts: Dr. Eric Bapteste; Dr. Philippe Lopez; Dr. Laurent Sagart