The Nature and Dimensions of Complexity in Morphology

Abstract

The multifacetedness of morphological complexity stems partly from the fact that linguistic complexity can be construed in more than one way, but also from the very nature of morphology. The complexity of morphological systems can be compared with respect to their morphotactics, to their word forms’ morphosyntactic content, to their exponence relations, to their derivational semantics, to their reliance on morphomic patterns, to the implicative relations among the forms in their inflectional paradigm, to their interfaces with other grammatical components, and to the relative parsability of their word forms. Recent research on morphological complexity has led to a precise proposal for quantifying complexity in some of these different dimensions; some dimensions, however, lend themselves to quantification more straightforwardly than others.