Areal pressure in grammatical evolution : An Indo-European case study
Typological features can be expected to exhibit the same diachronic development multiple times during the history of a language family, exhibiting what is known variously as recurrence, homoplasy, or drift. This paper seeks to quantify the areal signal shown by recurrent mor- phosyntactic changes across the Indo-European language family. We use 108 morphosyntactic feature variants taken from the DThis article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 Indo-European languages. We partition types of change (i.e., gain or loss) for each variant according to whether they bring about a simplification in morphosyntactic patterns that must be learned, whether they are neutral (i.e., neither simplifying nor introducing complexity) or whether they introduce