Chundra Cathcart
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His research revolves around linguistic evolution, with a focus on change in morphological and phonological systems. His work makes extensive use of Bayesian modeling (including phylogenetic modeling) as well as deep learning methods to address a large number of questions regarding the dynamics of language change, and has developed novel phylogenetic methods that assess the role of different linguistic and extralinguistic features on different properties of language change. He will contribute to quantitative aspects of the Constructive Advanced Thinking project.
Research Interests
Language change, computational biology, deep learning, phylogenetic relatedness, probabilistic models.
Unraveling the interactions between culture and language:
Does grammatical gender foster gender inequality and vice versa?
(Collaborative project, awarded a NetIAS Constructive Advanced Thinking grant, 2021-2024)
The human cognitive system interacts with the cultural environment. Within this interaction, the interplay between grammatical gender and sociocultural gender represents a societal challenge. The presence of grammatical gender (such as masculine and feminine) in language has an effect on how men and women are perceived by humans. Most studies compared languages with sex-based gender (such as masculine/feminine in Spanish) with languages that do not have a grammatical gender system (e.g., in English and Mandarin). However, other nominal classification systems such as noun classes (e.g., in Swahili) or classifiers (e.g., in Japanese) also categorize nouns of the lexicon into categories based on features such as animacy or shape. Furthermore, most languages considered in existing studies are Indo-European. Nevertheless, sex-based grammatical gender system are not restricted to this language family. For example, grammatical gender systems are also found in languages such as Mian (Ok family, Papua-New-Guinea).
We expand the data pool for testing the effect of nominal classification systems on gender parity. Information on grammatical gender and sociocultural gender is extracted from the data already gathered during the respective research of the project members. We then use quantitative methods to capture the multilevel interaction between the linguistic and the sociocultural variables.
Key Publications
2022. Gerd Carling, Chundra Cathcart and Erich Round. Reconstructing the origins of language families and variation. In Andrew Lock, Chris Sinha, and Nathalie Gontier (eds.), Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. Oxford University Press.
2021. Gerd Carling and Chundra Cathcart. Reconstructing the evolution of Indo-European grammar. Language 97:1–38.
2015. William Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall and Andrew Garrett. Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis. Language 91.1:194–244. Reprinted in The Best of Language: Volume III.
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