Why modelling space is hard: no evidence for a serial founder effect in Polynesian phoneme inventories

Abstract In recent years there has been an increased interest in computational modeling of spatial phenomena in typology. While the main focus of most work so far has been on direct language contact, there are two different types of spatial dynamics of interest to typologists and areal linguists: language expansion, and asymmetric contact effects. In this paper we present five statistical techniques to model phylogenetic and spatial relations between languages. We illustrate these techniques with a case study on Polynesian phoneme inventory sizes, and show that there is robust evidence for asymmetric contact effects from Non-Polynesian on Polynesian, but little evidence for expansion effects within Polynesian. In other words, we do not find convincing evidence for a serial founder effect in Polynesian phoneme inventory sizes. We also argue that we are still far from having a complete understanding of how to model all spatial dynamics that can affect language contact, and that more attention should be paid to these issues.