Linguistic complexity: a comprehensive definition and survey

Abstract

Abstract The long-received truism that all languages are ultimately about equal in complexity has taken some serious criticism in recent years. McWhorter (2001a) shows that one set of languages (creoles) are systematically less complex than most languages. Gil (1994, 2001; and cf. Chapter 2 above) shows that a non-creole variety of Indonesian is strikingly devoid of most kinds of morphosyntactic specificity and complexity, and Gil (2008) shows that isolating languages vary considerably in aspects of syntactic complexity. Ross (1996, 1997) and Dahl (2004) show that the sociolinguistics of contact and acquisition can greatly affect the complexity and amount of irregularity in a language. Hyslop (1993) shows that complexity in one lexical area (the number of distinctions in spatial demonstrative systems) varies inversely not with some other grammatical or lexical factor but with the size of the speech community; and Kaius Sinnemäki, in Chapter 9, below, demonstrates a subtler relationship between community size and a specific grammatical domain. Shosted (2006) and Sinnemäki (2008) select two components of grammar that might be expected to exhibit inverse levels of complexity if overall grammars were equally complex, and they show that there is little or no evidence of a negative correlation.

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