An Information-Theoretic Approach to Morphosyntactic Complexity in English, Dutch and German

Abstract

ABSTRACT Though equi-complexity of languages has long been an assumption in the study of language, recent research has argued that languages differ with regard to their morphological complexity. Some languages rely more on bound morphology to express grammatical meanings, whereas other languages rely more on lexical or word-order-based strategies. It is a moot point to what extent these differences correlate with demographic factors such as population size and language contact, and how complexity should be measured. In this study, we use information-theory, more specifically Kolmogorov Complexity, to assess morphological and word-order-based strategies and apply the procedure to three West Germanic languages, English, Dutch and German, which have been argued to form a continuum along the morphological complexity cline, plausibly due to different rates of demographic upheaval and concomitant language contact. Tracing the morphological and word-order-based complexity through time in parallel Bible translations, our results show that English is consistently less morphologically complex than its sisters, continuing on its path of morphological simplification. We see a statistically robust trade-off between morphology and word order complexity. We find support for earlier findings in the literature, with the exception of the difference between Dutch and German, which does not transpire in our results.