Jayden Macklin-Cordes

Jayden Macklin-Cordes

Lecturer in Linguistics

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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there, there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

Posts

Phonotactics in historical linguistics (Part II)

20 minute read

Published:

A few years ago, I did the thing where you write the thing, and now I’m legally entitled to sow confusion by shouting “I’m a doctor!” during medical emergencies on planes1. In a previous post (Part I), I wrote about the background and motivation behind the PhD project that kept me busy for so long. But I left it on a cliffhanger. The big question driving my PhD was whether I could build better family trees of languages (phylogenies) by combining traditional cognate data (sets of related words across languages) with a new kind of data extracted from phonotactics, the rules governing which sounds are allowed to appear together. At the end of the post, I promised a Part II discussing what I actually found. Four short years later, here it is. I appreciate your patience.

  1. Of course I would never do this. But I have watched my share of YouTube videos on how to land a plane, just in case the need should ever arise. ↩

Rookies into rolled gold

26 minute read

Published:

I actually love the footy. It’s weird to say, as a white Aussie dude, but that hasn’t always been the easiest thing to admit. I’ve spent a lot of time floating around the kinds of academic circles where you’re more likely to hear derisive references to “sportsball”. And look, I get it, there’s aspects of footy culture that aren’t always the most attractive. But sport generally has a lot going for it - it’s shaped my whole life. And Australian Rules football, I firmly believe, is one of the most majestic sports of all. It has this kind of beautifully holistic brutality about it. Other sports have individual aspects where they excel - bigger hits, more pure strength, or endurance. But I can think of few if any other sports that demand so much all-round, mentally and physically, of its combatants. The physicality, gut-busting running on a uniquely enormous field, all while executing extraordinarily difficult fine skills, it’s got it all. It’s even uniquely difficult to officiate, requiring an entire third team of elite athletes just to administer the game. I briefly flirted with AFL selection as a boundary umpire, running around in the (now defunct) NEAFL in the early 2010s. I’d regularly run over 20km in a game, and then spend the rest of the day lying in my dark bedroom with a migraine, and then I’d do it all over again the next weekend, because running around the SCG or Manuka Oval and just being a part of the whole thing was really fucking fun. A boundary umpire’s job is largely to run up and down and throw the ball back in play when it goes out of bounds. Even then, just doing a boundary throw-in at NEAFL (RIP) or AFL standard is a specialist skill, requiring specialist training, from a specialist boundary umpire coach, just to be able to do it. The whole thing is bizarre really, and I love it.

portfolio

publications

High-definition phonotactics reflect linguistic pasts

Published in Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics (QITL-6), 2015

Typological datasets for quantitative historicallinguistic inquiry are growing in breadth, but a challenge is also to increase their depth, since advanced methods often ideally require many hundreds of traits per language.

Recommended citation: Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. & Erich R. Round. 2015. High-definition phonotactics reflect linguistic pasts. Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics (QITL-6). Tübingen: University of Tübingen.
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Automated parsing of interlinear glossed text from page images of grammatical descriptions

Published in Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC-2020), 2020

We demonstrate fundamental viability for a technology that can assist in making a large number of linguistic data sources machine readable: the automated identification and parsing of interlinear glossed text from scanned page images.

Recommended citation: Round, Erich R., T. Mark Ellison, Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes, Sacha Beniamine. 2020. Automated parsing of interlinear glossed text from page images of grammatical descriptions. Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC-2020), 2871--2876. Marseille, France: European Languages Resources Association.
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Re-evaluating phoneme frequencies

Published in Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. In the wake of a major debate around power-law hypotheses and the unreliability of earlier methods of evaluating them, we re-evaluate the distributions claimed to characterize phoneme frequencies.

Recommended citation: Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. & Erich R. Round. 2020. Re-evaluating phoneme frequencies. Frontiers in Psychology 11.
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Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics

Published in Diachronica, 2021

Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data – in this instance, statistical phonotactics.

Recommended citation: Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L., Claire Bowern & Erich R. Round. 2021. Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics. Diachronica. 38(2). pp. 210–258.
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Challenges of sampling and how phylogenetic comparative methods help: With a case study of the Pama-Nyungan laminal contrast

Published in Linguistic Typology, 2022

Phylogenetic methods are shrouded in a little mystery for many linguists. Yet the path that led to their discovery in comparative biology is so similar to the methodological history of balanced sampling, that it is only an accident of history that they were not discovered by a typologist. Here we clarify the essential logic behind phylogenetic comparative methods and their fundamental relatedness to a deep intellectual tradition focussed on sampling.

Recommended citation: Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. & Erich R. Round. 2022. Challenges of sampling and how phylogenetic comparative methods help: With a case study of the Pama-Nyungan laminal contrast. Linguistic Typology. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2021-0025
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talks

Evaluating information loss from phonological dimensionality reduction

Published:

As in many sciences, cross-linguistic data is often complex and multi-dimensional. The PHOIBLE database of phonological inventories (Moran et al. 2014) is one example, containing 2160 distinct segments across 2155 phoneme inventories. Each segment type is defined by a unique vector of (mostly binary) distinctive phonetic and phonological features. This multivariate dataset can be modeled as a set of coordinates, where each variable (e.g. segment, its distinctive features, its presence in a language, the language’s genealogy and location) is an axis in high-dimensional space.

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Phylogenetic comparative methods in everyday typology

Published:

Macklin-Cordes, Jayden L. & Erich R. Round. 2022. Phylogenetic comparative methods in everyday typology. 55th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE2022). University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania. https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2022/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/06/SLE_2022_abstract_115.pdf.

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teaching

Teaching experience 1

Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014

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Teaching experience 2

Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015

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