LAUSR

This volume contains an introduction and eight papers presented at an international symposium ‘Let's Talk about Trees’, which was organised by Ritsuko Kikusawa and hosted by the National Museum of Ethnology of Osaka, Japan, in February 2013. The stated purpose of the meeting was to evaluate the pros and cons of the classic tree model of historical linguistics in describing the order of splits within a language family. Because the problem of modelling relationships of descent is common to other disciplines, contributors were invited from a range of academic disciplines, including not only linguistics, but also what is described on page one as ‘cladistics’, ‘biology’ and ‘genetics’, although cladistics is clearly a part of biological taxonomy, and not an independent discipline.