Bernard Comrie: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Department of Linguistics & UC Santa Barbara Department of Linguistics

An understanding of the transmission of language across time requires reference to both vertical transmission – for instance, the English word “father” is a direct inheritance from the ancestral language Proto-Indo-European – and horizontal transmission – “paternal” was taken from Latin in the medieval period. This applies not only to vocabulary but also to language structure (grammar). The recently completed project The World Atlas of Language Structures (www.wals.info) for the first time provides the possibility of investigating such relations in detail. The talk will refer specifically to structural features that seem more amenable to either vertical or horizontal transmission, and include discussion of linguistic areas like Southeast Asia that result from widespread horizontal transmission and of the kinds of historical signals that can be detected in comparing structural information from languages of sub-Saharan Africa.