Cladistic Methods in Textual, Linguistic, and Phylogenetic Analysis

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Abstract
The concept that historical interrelationships can be demonstrated only by the presence of shared innovations is fundamental to the fields of textual and linguistic, as well as phylogenetic, reconstruction. All 3 fields utilize analogous procedures in which data are organized into transformation series of homologous character states, the polarity of these transformation series is determined by out-group comparison, and shared innovations are used to construct internested series of 3-taxon statements that operate at a level of generality above that of specific ancestor-descendant hypotheses. The acceptance of these methods as the standard operational tools in separate fields suggests that cladistic analysis is a general comparative method applicable to all studies of historical interrelationships based on ancestor-descendant sequences, and that biologists concerned with such questions can ill afford to ignore cladistic theory and methods.

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