Hedvig's Evolutionary/Diversity Linguistics Mixtape vol. 1

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Lately I've been reading papers in diversity and evolutionary linguistics and some in biology. And I've also been creating mixtapes for friends. So, it occurred to me to make a mixtape of academic papers that go well together and that I think should be shared, and well.. here we are now. This is Hedvig's Evolutionary/Diversity Linguistics Mixtape Vol.1! It features some well-known classics, some perhaps lesser well-known ones. They're ordered alphabetically, but can be read ever which way. There's a link to a free PDF for almost all of the publications.

The intention is not to create an exhaustive list of everything in evolutionary/diversity linguistics that is important (just like a mixtape of pop songs does not consist of all excellent pop songs), these publications have been especially selected for how they go together. They are also very suitable for new comers to these kinds of research questions, they're quite accessibly written and readable for non-linguists. I hope you'll see what I mean after having read a few.

 Many thanks to Simon Greenhill who pointed out several of these to me (and who also wrote three).
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Track list

  • Evans, N. and Levinson, S. C. (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32.
  • Gray, R., Drummond, A., and Greenhill, S. (2009). Language phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and pauses in pacific settlement. Science, 323.
  • Greenhill, S. (2015). Demographic Correlates of Language Diversity. In Bowern, C. and Evans, B., editors, The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon, UK and New York, USA. 
  • Greenhill SJ. (2015). Evolution and Language: Phylogenetic Analyses. In The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd Edition. Wright, JD (Ed). Elsevier: Oxford.
  • Ives, A. R., Midford, P. E., and Theodore Garland, J. (2007). Within-species variation and measurement error in phylogenetic comparative methods. Systematic Biology, 56(2):252–270.
  • Levinson, S. C. and Evans, N. (2010). Time for a sea-change in linguistics: Response to comments on ’The myth of language universals’. Lingua, 120.
  • Levinson, S. C. and Gray, R. D. (2012). Tools from evolutionary biology shed new light on the diversification of languages. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(3):167 – 173. 
  • Penny, D. and Phillips, M. J. (2004). The rise of birds and mammals: are microevolutionary processes sufficient for macroevolution? Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 19(10).
  • Reznick, D. and Ricklefs, R. (2009). Darwin's bridge between microevolution and macroevolution.
  • Szmrecsanyi, B., Wälchli, B., and Auer, P., (eds) (2014), Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and Register Analysis : Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech, Linguae and litterae: 28. Walter de Gruyter, Tubingen. 
  • Verkerk, A. (2014). The evolutionary dynamics of motion event encoding. PhD thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen.
  • Honkola, T (2016) Macro- and microevolution of languages: exploring linguistic divergence with approaches from evolutionary biology. PhD thesis, University of Turku.
    • LINK TO FREE PDF (PhD thesis by compilation, some of the included publications must be sought elsewhere) 
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At the top is a picture of the front of the mixtape (adaptation of the mixtape from Guardians of the Galaxy), and here is the back. For more on this back image, go here.
From Strickberger (1990). Read more here.

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