Kessler's encyclopedia entry on Language Families

Brett Kessler. (in Press). Language Families. . In Hogan, P. C. (Ed.). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences.
http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/~bkessler/CELS/Language_Families.pdf

He points out that it is a model divergence, not similarity that is the basis of family relationships.

"... a particular model of LANGUAGE CHANGE: divergence. When innovations in one part of a language community fail to spread to other parts, differences accumulate until the community can be said to speak different languages."

"there is no requirement that cognates be similar at all (e.g., English two is related to Armenian yerku), and many sources of similarity are disavowed as being irrelevant to the model. These include borrowing (see CONTACT, LANGUAGE), onomatopoeia, universals (ABSOLUTE AND STATISTICAL UNIVERSALS), and chance similarities."

The problem I am interested in related to the Bisayan subfamily is called cladogenesis: "Subgrouping seeks to uncover the history of the divergence (cladogenesis) of a language family." What is important is not to look for cognate sets, but for a sister subfamily that has a base character rather than an member of the cognate set.

"the linguist looks for evidence that some proper subset of those languages may have descended from an intermediate common ancestor. This is done by looking for shared innovations (synapomorphies) – sound changes or new words or grammatical constructions that were not in the ancestor language but are found in two or more of the descendant languages."

"some of Greenberg’s key ideas can be transformed into algorithmic (reproducible) methodologies that introduce to language family research the benefit of statistical significance testing. Oswalt’s procedure (1998) minimized experimenter bias by requiring that a specific concept list be used and that one specify in advance specific criteria for measuring degree of similarity between two languages. Baxter and Manaster Ramer (2000) added reliable significance testing procedures based on randomization tests. Kessler and Lehtonen (2006) adapted the technique to handle multiple languages in a single test, informally confirming Greenberg’s claim that such large-scale comparisons are inherently more powerful than two-language comparisons. Ringe (1992; see Kessler 2001 for extensive discussion and methodological refinements) measured not similarity but the number of recurrent sound correspondences. This has the advantages both of being closer to the traditional comparative method and of generating correspondences useful for subgrouping and reconstruction. Disappointingly, however, none of these neo-Greenbergian techniques found evidence for the deep relations that were advertised for the original, impressionistic, method."

There may be hope for quantifying evidence.

"The recent development of computational cladistic methods similar to those used in biology (e.g., Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor 2002) is a tremendous advance in helping the linguist find optimal trees. In addition, several solutions to the problem of borrowing have emerged in the form of programs that construct networks instead of trees. Shared innovations that cannot be cleanly attributed to a shared ancestor are taken as evidence of contact, obviating somewhat the need to make a priori judgments about whether borrowing was involved (e.g., Bryant, Philimon, and Gray 2005; Nakhleh, Ringe, and Warnow 2005)."

"Recent computer techniques add simplicity, reproducibility, and quantitative rigor to methodologies for proving relationships between languages, but so far there has been no noticeable increase in power over what experts are able to do by hand."

References

• Baxter, William H. and Alexis Manaster Ramer, 2000. “Beyond Lumping and Splitting: Probabilistic Issues in Historical Linguistics.” In Time Depth in Historical
  
• Linguistics, ed. Colin Renfrew, April McMahon and Larry Trask, 167–188. Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
  
• Blust, Robert. 1999. “Subgrouping, Circularity and Extinction: Some Issues in Austronesian Comparative Linguistics.” In Selected Papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, ed. E. Zeitoun and P. J. K Li, 31–94. Taipei: Academia Sinica.
  
• Bryant, David, Flavia Filimon, and 
  
• Russell D. Gray. 2005. “Untangling Our Past: Languages, Trees, Splits and Networks.” In The Evolution of Cultural Diversity: A Phylogenetic Approach, ed. Ruth Mace, Clare J. Holden, and Stephen Shennan, 69–85. London: UCL Press.
  
• Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton University Press
  
• Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.). 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 15th ed. Dallas, TX: SIL International. Content also available online at http://www.ethnologue.com/
  
• Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. “The Languages of Africa.” International Journal of American Linguistics, supplement 29(1), pt. 2.
  
• Greenberg, Joseph H., 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press.
  
• Greenberg, Joseph H., 2002. Indo-European and its Closest Relatives: the Eurasiatic Language Family: Lexicon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  
• Kessler, Brett, 2001. The Significance of Word Lists. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
  
• Kessler, Brett and Annukka Lehtonen. 2006. “Multilateral Comparison and Significance Testing of the Indo-Uralic Question.” In Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages, ed. P. Forster and C. Renfrew, 33–42. Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
  
• Mallory, J. P. 1989. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and 
  
• Myth. London: Thames & Hudson.
  
• Nakhleh, Luay, Don Ringe, and Tandy Warnow. 2005. “Perfect Phylogenetic Networks: A New Methodology for Reconstructing the Evolutionary History of Natural Languages.” Language 81: 382–420.
  
• Oswalt, Robert L., 1998. “A Probabilistic Evaluation of North Eurasiatic Nostratic.” In Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence, ed. J. C. Salmons and B. D. Joseph, 199–216. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  
• Renfrew, Colin. 1987. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. London: Pimlico.
  
• Ringe, Don A., Jr., 1992. On Calculating the Factor of Chance in Language Comparison. Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society.
• Ringe, Don, Tandy Warnow, and A. Taylor. 2002. “Indo-European and Computational Cladistics.” Transactions of the Philological Society 100: 59–129.
  
• Swadesh, Morris, 1955. “Towards Greater Accuracy in Lexicostatistic Dating.” International Journal of American Linguistics 21: 121–37.
  
• Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kessler's home page.

His thesis at Stanford was on:

Thesis title: Estimating the Probability of Historical Connections Between Languages. Available through UMI. However, a significantly revised version is published by CSLI Publications under the titleThe Significance of Word Lists: Statistical Tests for Investigating Historical Connections Between Languages and is distributed by The University of Chicago Press (2001; ISBN cloth 1-575862-99-9, paper 1-575863-00-6). From the preface: