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<Paper uid="W97-1101">
  <Title>New Zealand</Title>
  <Section position="10" start_page="5" end_page="5" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
8 Conclusion and Future Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we have provided an objective framework which will enable us to obtain distance measures between related languages. The method has been illustrated and the first step towards actually applying it for historical Chinese linguistics has also been taken. It has been pointed out to us, though, that the methodology described in this paper could in fact be put to better use than in just deriving distance measures. The suggestion was that it should be possible, in principle, to use the method to choose between competing reconstructions of protolanguages as this tends to be a relatively more contentious area than subgrouping.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> It is indeed possible to use the method to do this -- we could retain the basic procedure, but shift the focus from studying two descendants of a common parent to studying two proposed parents of a common set of descendants. A protolanguage is usually postulated in conjunction with a set of diachronic rules that derive forms in the descendant languages.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We could thus use the methodology described in this paper to derive a large number of forms in the descendant languages from each of the two competing protolanguages. Since descriptive economy is one of the deciding factors in selecting historical linguistic hypotheses, the size of each body of derivations, suitably encoded in the form of automata, in conjunction with other linguistic considerations will then give the plausibility of that reconstruction. Further study of this line of approach is, however, left as a topic for future research.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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