Borja Herce and Balthasar Bickel are giving a talk on "Quantitative detection of cognacy in the predictive structure of inflection classes: Romance conjugations against the broader typological variation" at the SIGTYP conference:
Can entropy metrics of paradigmatic predictability preserve a long-term phylogenetic signal? Initial results suggest the answer to this question is 'yes'. We compare Romance conjugations to a sample of 30+ unrelated inflection class systems from around the world and find out that the relevant metrics in Romance differ from the control sample in either mean or variance or both. This suggests that this type of measures have great potential in diachronic research e.g. to inform debates on cognacy and genetic relatedness.
