Correlating Complexity: A Typological Approach

Abstract

In sum, linguists don't even think of trying to rate languages as good or bad, simple or complex." (O'Grady et al. 2005: 7

Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs

“…Phonological constraints extend beyond individual units to the structure of entire words themselves, as we discussed above; so why stop at counting phonemes? One step in that direction is to investigate the syllabic structure of language, and count the number of possible licit syllables in the language (Maddieson and Disner, 1984;Shosted, 2006). Syllabic complexity brings us closer to a more holistic measure of phonological complexity.…”

Computational linguistics and discourse complexology: Paradigms and research methods

“…Research has indicated that high levels of local complexity at one level in a language do not necessarily entail low local complexity at another level, as predicted by the "dogma of equal complexity". For example, the analysis of metrics of morphological and phonological complexity in 34 languages carried out by R. Shosted did not reveal any expected statistically significant correlation (Shosted 2006). And the individual "balancing effects" (trade-offs) between local complexities observed by G. Fenk-Ozlog and A. Fenk, unfortunately, are also insufficient to validate the "dogma of equal complexity" of languages.…”

“…In the early 2000s the idea of linguistic complexity and the "dogma of equal complexity" was actively discussed at conferences and seminars (see the seminar "Language complexity as an evolving variable" organized by Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in 2007 in Leipzig ENA, June 6, 2022 13 ), in a number of journal articles (cf. Shosted 2006, Trudgill 2004) and monographs (Dahl 2009, Kusters 2003, Sampson et al 2009.…”

“…And if the assessment of global complexity of a language, according to researchers, is a very ambitious and probably hopeless task which H. Deutscher compares with "chasing wild geese" (Deutscher 2009), then the measurement of local complexity is considered as a feasible task, which imples the compiling of a list and evaluating complexity predictors at various language levels. The list of predictors of phonological complexity traditionally includes phoneme inventory, frequency of marked 14 phonemes, tonal differences, suprasegmental patterns, phonotactic restrictions, and maximal consonant clusters (Nichols 2009, Shosted 2006. When evaluating morphological complexity, classical "inconvenience factors" (Braunmüller's term 1990: 627) are the size of inflectional morphology of a language (or language variety), specificity of allomorph and morphophonemic processes, etc.…”

“…A language is considered more complex if it has more marked phonemes, tones, syntactic rules, grammatically expressed semantic and / or pragmatic differences, morphophonemic rules, more cases of addition, allomorph, agreement, etc. Scholars working in the area are interested, for example, in the number of grammatical categories in the language (Shosted 2006), the number of phonemic oppositions (McWhorter 2008), the length of the "minimal description" of the language system (Dahl 2009). McWhorter (2001) compares word order, i.e.…”