Phylogenetic Inference of the Tibeto-Burman Languages Or on the Usefulness of Lexicostatistics (and "megalo"-comparison) for the Subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman

It has been argued that lexicostatistical methods cannot be fruitfully applied to the Tibeto-Burman (or the larger Sino-Tibetan) language family. This dissertation first develops a statistical method for determining linguistic cognates (or sound correspondences) between arbitrarily many languages. This method is then applied to a subset of the Sino-Tibetan languages to infer the correspondences and further develops a method for lexicostatistical analysis for subgrouping those languages