Phylogenetic exploration of language complexity in Austronesian, Bantu, and Indo-European Language Families

Olena Shcherbakova, Hedvig Skirgård, Simon Greenhill

    Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper

    Abstract

    While language complexity has received attention from sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and computational perspectives, the processes of simplification and complexification over time remain challenging to examine and explain. One strand of research focuses on complexity 'tradeoffs' and 'local complexity' asking whether complexification in one grammatical domain necessitates simplification in another so that all languages are 'equi-complex' (Miestamo, 2009, Sinnemäki, 2008). The tradeoffs may or may not occur between different language systems, such as phonetics and morphology (Shosted, 2006), morphology and syntax (Dahl, 2009, Sinnemäki, 2008), morphosyntax and vocabulary size (Reali et al., 2018), and morphosyntax and semantics (Bisang, 2009).
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages411-413
    Publication statusPublished - 2020
    Event13th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EvoLang13) - Belgium
    Duration: 1 Jan 2020 → …

    Conference

    Conference13th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EvoLang13)
    Period1/01/20 → …

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