Abstract
Insofar as linguists operate with a conception of languages as closed and self-contained systems, there should be no obstacle to comparing those systems in terms of simplicity and complexity. Even if complexity ‘trade-offs’ between sub-systems of phonology, morphology and syntax are considered, it ought to be relatively straightforward to quantify constitutive elements and rules, and assign each language system its place on a complexity scale. In practice, however, such attempts have turned up a series of problems and paradoxes, which can be seen in work by Peter Trudgill and Johanna Nichols; the latter has proposed an alternative means of measuring complexity which presents new problems of its own. This paper makes the case that overcoming the difficulty of measuring simplicity and complexity requires confronting the normative and interpretative judgments that enter into how language systems are conceived, identified and analysed.
Highlights
Linguistic simplicity and complexity have been the site of such profound scepticism over such a long period that one has to admire the defiant persistence of those who pursue its investigation
Within research on linguistic complexity we find a continuum with, at one end, work of a deeply quantitative nature, aimed at developing a precise scale of complexity; in the centre, work that is quantitative but cautious about precise measures because of the obstacles to obtaining them; and at the other end, work that does not try to establish numerical measures, only descriptive ones
Not in a clearly defined normative location either, but something like a blurred and shifting field of vision where one eye is gazing through the normativity of the language community, and the other eye through the normativity of the linguistics community in its analytical choices
Summary
Linguistic simplicity and complexity have been the site of such profound scepticism over such a long period that one has to admire the defiant persistence of those who pursue its investigation. In a sense, identifying order within a language is a way of simplifying it for purposes of analysis and understanding: when a set of hundreds of Latin words is reduced to one root verb and half a dozen morphological categories (person, number, tense, aspect, mood etc., which in combination take hundreds of inflectional endings to express them), that certainly simplifies the picture for the analyst – who may assume that this was the mental system of every ancient Roman speaker of Latin.
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