Measuring linguistic complexity: The morphological tier

Patrick Juola

111 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Quantitative Linguistics

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Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Linguistics and Language Studies Natural Language Processing Techniques

Abstract

How to measure morphological complexity is itself an issue of some complexity. (Nichols, 1992) This article develops an information‐theoretic and functionally motivated method of measuring “linguistic complexity”; from corpora that can in theory be applied to any definable substructure. This method is further extended into a way of objectively and numerically measuring the morphological complexity of a given language sample, avoiding the typical difficulties of focusing on only a few unrepresentative types of constructions. By selectively altering the morphological information present in a sample, the complexity can be measured as the change in overall informativeness of a text. This claim has been tested in a small‐scale cross‐linguistic experiment; the results agree well with both intuitions and existing measurements.

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References

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2015Inflectional Paradigms: Content and Form at the Syntax-Morphology Interface 2019Token-based typology and word order entropy: A study based on Universal Dependencies 2018Multiple approaches to complexity in second language research 2010Quantifying the Development of Inflectional Diversity 2017Measuring orthographic transparency and morphological-syllabic complexity in alphabetic orthographies: a narrative review

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