The relevance of valence orientation for clustering three Niger-Congo language families

Valence orientation is one of the typological parameters used in linguistics to differentiate the phylogenetic affiliation of languages. Within previous studies, a sample of 18 verb pairs is commonly used to compare the valence orientation across languages. However, recent studies suggest that verb pairs 10-18 are more relevant than verb pairs 1-9 to identify the phylogenetic affiliation of languages. This study further develops these hypotheses by assessing quantitatively the predictive power of the 18 verb pairs with regard to 38 languages from the Atlantic, Mande, and Mel families. The results from clustering and classification analyses show that verb pairs 10-18 are indeed more relevant to identify the phylogenetic affiliation of languages from the current sample. Moreover, the analysis pinpoints which specific features play a major role in the classification task.