Syntactic Methods for Language Phylogenies

Phylogenetic linguistics and long‐term historical analysis have been recently marked by a growing reliance on quantitative methods. The Parametric Comparison Method (PCM) builds on this trend, but in order to pursue a full scientific renovation of the field, it proposes a qualitative shift in the type of characters used for taxonomic reconstruction: it uses such abstract characters as generative syntactic parameters to trace measurable historical links among languages even in the absence of etymological evidence. This way, the PCM provides results that may have far‐reaching implications for theoretical and historical linguistics, as well as for related disciplines.