La ricostruzione filogenetica in sintassi: il metodo di comparazione parametrica

La conferenza fa parte del ciclo delle Conversazioni linguistiche, una serie di incontri che offrono a linguiste/i italiane/i e internazionali un'occasione per confrontarsi sui rispettivi studi e per tenersi aggiornate/i sui nuovi sviluppi della ricerca.

• Cristina Guardiano - Università degli Studi di Modena-Reggio Emilia

The Parametric Comparison Method (PCM, www.parametricomparison.unimore.it) is a research line which combines the goal of reconstructing language history with the analytical tools of formal grammar and cognitive science.
The basic hypothesis behind this method (Longobardi 2003; Guardiano and Longobardi 2005, 2017; Longobardi and Guardiano 2009, 2017) is that, contrary to most claims over the past two centuries, syntactic diversity encodes language history to a remarkable extent. Thus, the PCM explores the possibility of historical classification of languages using generative syntactic parameters as comparanda. The measurement of the degree of similarity between remote languages is one of the major assets
of the PCM, which allows it to go beyond the limits of families identified by means of lexical etymologies. So far, its implementations have shown that: (1) the distribution of parametric distances is informative and non-random (Guardiano and Longobardi 2005, Bortolussi et al. 2011); (2) their aggregations retrieve almost all independently established genealogical clusters (Longobardi et al. 2013, Guardiano et al. 2016, Ceolin et al. 2020); (3) they suggest deeper relations that can be statistically assessed through explicit methods (Ceolin et al. 2021). On these grounds, the PCM could be applied to the investigation of time-deep history in collaboration with other disciplines (Colonna et al. 2010, Longobardi et al. 2015, Santos et al. 2020).