Syntactic Structures and the General Markov Models.

We study phylogenetic signal present in syntactic information by considering the syntactic structures data from Longobardi (Linguist Anal 41:517–557, 2017), Collins (Syntactic structures of the world’s language: a cross-linguistic database. 27 September (2010), Colloquium: , 2010), Ceolin et al. (Front Psychol 11:2384, 2020) and Koopman (SSWL syntactic structures of the world’s languages: an open-ended database for the linguistic community and by the linguistic community. mit 50, 12. , 2011). Focusing first on the general Markov models, we explore how well the the syntactic structures data conform to the hypothesis required by these models. We do this by comparing derived phylogenetic trees against trees agreed on by the linguistics community. We then interpret the methods of Ceolin et al. (2020) as an infinite sites evolutionary model and compare the consistency of the data with this alternative. The ideas and methods discussed in the present paper are more generally applicable than to the specific setting of syntactic structures, and can be used in other contexts, when analyzing consistency of data with against hypothesized evolutionary models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]