CHIELD: the causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database

Seán G. Roberts, Anton Killin, Angarika Deb, Catherine Sheard, Simon J. Greenhill, Kaius Sinnemäki, José Segovia-Martín, Jonas Nölle, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Archie Humphreys-Balkwill, Hannah Little, Christopher Opie, Guillaume Jacques, Lindell Bromham, Peeter Tinits, Robert M. Ross, Sean Lee, Emily Gasser, Jasmine Calladine, Matthew SpikeStephen Francis Mann, Olena Shcherbakova, Ruth Singer, Shuya Zhang, Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Christian Kliesch, Ewan Thomas-Colquhoun, Hedvig Skirgård, Monica Tamariz, Sam Passmore, Thomas Pellard, Fiona Jordan

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    24 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Language is one of the most complex of human traits. There are many hypotheses about how it originated, what factors shaped its diversity, and what ongoing processes drive how it changes. We present the Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD, https://chield.excd.org/), a tool for expressing, exploring, and evaluating hypotheses. It allows researchers to integrate multiple theories into a coherent narrative, helping to design future research. We present design goals, a formal specification, and an implementation for this database. Source code is freely available for other fields to take advantage of this tool. Some initial results are presented, including identifying conflicts in theories about gossip and ritual, comparing hypotheses relating population size and morphological complexity, and an author relation network.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)101-120
    Number of pages20
    JournalJournal of Language Evolution
    Volume5
    Issue number2
    Early online date16 Apr 2020
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Aug 2020

    Keywords

    • causal graphs
    • causal inference
    • database

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