Chundra Cathcart
PD Dr. Chundra Cathcart
Senior Researcher (Oberassistent)
Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics Group
I am a diachronic linguist whose work has a quantitative and computational bent. My main interests concern sound change and morphosyntactic change. Broadly speaking, I am interested in the pressures that interact to shape the synchronic profiles of languages, with a focus on languages of Central, South and Southeast Asia. I use a wide range of tools in my approach to these issues. I use a wide range of quantitative and computational tools to investigate these issues, including Bayesian models and methods from deep learning, and seek to develop models that are flexible enough to address a wide range of questions of interest to diachronic linguists and linguists more generally.
For more information, please visit my personal website
ZORA Publication List
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Publications
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Beyond bigrams: call sequencing in the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) vocal system. Royal Society Open Science, 11(11):218-240.
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Exploring the evolutionary dynamics of sound symbolism. In: 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Rotterdam, 24 Juli 2024 - 27 Juli 2024. UC Merced, 1076-1083.
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Finding proportionality in computational approaches to morphological change. In: 15th International Conference on Language Evolution (Evolang XV), Madison, WI, 18 May 2024. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistic, 83.
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Short vs long stem alternations in Romance verbal inflection: the S-morphome. Transactions of the Philological Society, 122(1):49-78.
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Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical consonant avoidance in the world’s languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121(27):e2316677121.
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Review of Frederik Hartmann: Germanic phylogeny. Folia Linguistica Historica, 45(1):325-330.
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Rate variation in language change: Toward distributional phylogenetic modeling. In: Karakostis, Fotios Alexandros; Jäger, Gerhard. Biocultural Evolution: An Agenda for Integrative Approaches. Tübingen: Kerns Verlag, 179-202.
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Paradigmatic heterogeneity and homogenization: probing Paul's principle. In: Kavitskaya, Darya; Yu, Alan. The life cycle of language: past, present, and future. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 371-385.
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The evolutionary trends of noun class systems in Atlantic languages. In: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE), Kanazawa, 5 September 2022 - 8 September 2022. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistic, 624-631.
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Reconstructing the origins of language families and variation. In: Lock, Andrew; Sinha, Chris; Gontier, Nathalie. The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, online.
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Dialectal layers in West Iranian: A hierarchical dirichlet process approach to linguistic relationships. Transactions of the Philological Society, 120(1):1-31.
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The evolution of similarity avoidance: a phylogenetic approach to phonotactic change. In: 2022 Annual Meetings on Phonology, Los Angeles, 21 Oktober 2022 - 23 Oktober 2022. Linguistic Society of America, online.
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Decoupling Speed of Change and Long-Term Preference in Language Evolution: Insights From Romance Verb Stem Alternations. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE), Kanazawa, Japan, 5 September 2022 - 8 September 2022, JCoLE.
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Evolutionary dynamics of Indo-European alignment patterns. Diachronica, 38:358-412.
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Reconstructing the evolution of Indo-European grammar. Language, 97(3):561-598.
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Disentangling dialects: a neural approach to Indo-Aryan historical phonology and subgrouping. In: Fernández, Raquel; Linzen, Tal. Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning. Online: Association for Computational Linguistics, 620-630.
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Numeral classifiers and number marking in Indo-Iranian: A phylogenetic approach. Language Dynamics and Change, 11(2):273-325.
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Linguistic stability and change under small-scale egalitarian language contact: a mixture model approach. In: CogSci 2020, Online, 29 July 2020 - 1 August 2020. Cognitive Science Society, 3109-3115.
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In search of isoglosses: continuous and discrete language embeddings in Slavic historical phonology. In: Nicolai, Garrett; Gorman, Kyle; Cotterell, Ryan. Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology. Association for Computational Linguistics: Association for Computational Linguistics, 233-244.
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A probabilistic assessment of the Indo-Aryan Inner–Outer Hypothesis. Journal of Historical Linguistics, 10(1):42-86.