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Spatial Distance and Lexical Replacement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

L. L. Cavalli-Sforza  and
William S-Y. Wang
L. L. Cavalli-Sforza
Affiliation:
Stanford University
William S-Y. Wang
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

The ‘stepping-stone’ model has been used to study genetic similarity of peoples as a function of the geographical distances separating them. A gene is represented by one of several alleles, much as a meaning is represented by one of many words. Based on this parallel, the stepping-stone model is here applied to a body of linguistic data from a chain of Micronesian islands. The logarithm of the lexical similarity, when plotted against geographical distance, shows a pronounced upper concavity not found in the genetic investigations. This deviation from linearity is largely caused by non-homogeneity of replacement rates in the words studied. Another contributing factor is that the effect of distance on lexical similarity is much greater for the eastern islands in the group.

Rates of replacement in space, computed here, show a significant positive correlation with those in time, computed for a related language or for different groups of languages.*

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 62 , Issue 1 , March 1986 , pp. 38 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This manuscript was completed while the authors were Fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. We are grateful for financial support provided by NIH grant GM 20467, NSF grant BNS 76-22943, an Exxon Education Foundation grant, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant 82-2-10.

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