Earticle

For the last few decades the method of computational phylogenetic analysis has been successfully adopted in numerous cases of text-critical works. It has opened a new possibility of textual criticism based on the possibility of dealing with a number on taxa with long lists of characters. But it seems that the method introduced to the field not only new technical possibilities but also a new perspective of textual stemmatics. To make this point clear an attempt is made in the present article to differentiate clearly the phylogenetic analysis (in Hennigian sense) from the computational cladistics. The major point is that the former method accepts the presupposed evolutionary process not only in the formal sense but also in the historical one. Overall, the different methodological possibilities offered by the computational phologenetic analysis and cladistics have, in my view, their own advantages depending on the general situation of the textual transmission of the target texts. Furthermore, indifferentiated application of the traditional philological method would not be valid, if it is adopted without any reference to a concrete history of text transmission(s). I have additionally attempted to make some suggestions for the future text-critical works with regard to the orally transmitted literature of Korea.