Complexity as L2-difficulty: Implications for syntactic change

Abstract

Recent work has cast doubt on the idea that all languages are equally complex; however, the notion of syntactic complexity remains underexplored. Taking complexity to equate to difficulty of acquisition for late L2 acquirers, we propose an operationalization of syntactic complexity in terms of uninterpretable features. Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology predicts that sociohistorical situations involving substantial late L2 acquisition should be conducive to simplification, i.e. loss of such features. We sketch a programme for investigating this prediction. In particular, we suggest that the loss of bipartite negation in the history of Low German and other languages indicates that it may be on the right track.

Natural language syntax complies with the free-energy principle

“…While syntacticians have proposed economy principles, these all effectively boil down to efficient tree-search, staying true to basic intuitions like "less search is preferable to more search"-without formalizing these intuitions or attempting to broach this topic with neighboring fields that might be able to provide highly valuable analytic tools. Syntactic complexity can be operationalized across a number of dimensions, such as online processing/parsing complexity (Hawkins 2004), tree-search and node counts (Szmrecsányi 2004), number of MERGE applications (Samo 2021), cyclic/derivational complexity (Trotzke & Zwart 2014), internal representational complexity as opposed to derivational size (van Gelderen 2011), entropy reduction (Hale 2016), or stages of second-language development (Walkden & Breitbarth 2019).…”

A bifurcation threshold for contact-induced language change

“…Consider the following examples (via Montrul, 2004, p. 226 With a null pronoun, the understood subject of the embedded clause in this example may or may not be coreferential with the subject of the main clause (7), whereas with an overt pronoun the referents of the subjects must differ: the interpretation in which the pronoun is bound is strictly ungrammatical if the pronoun is overt (8). Evidence now exists that features of this kind -ones that hinge on the syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics interfaces -are difficult for L2 learners to acquire (Sorace and Serratrice, 2009; see also Walkden and Breitbarth, 2019 for a theoretical account of the diachrony of null subjects as loss/gain of uninterpretable features).…”

“…The idea that a mixed population of L1 and L2 speakers can give rise to language change is not new (Bentz & Winter, 2013;Sessarego, 2015;Sinnemäki & Di Garbo, 2018;Trudgill, 2011;Walkden & Breitbarth, 2019). The complexity of such a mixed situation is rarely appreciated, however.…”

“…Sometimes this number is low in relation to the number of those speaking the variety as a first language (L1); in other cases, the ratio of L2 speakers to L1 speakers may be relatively high. Following Trudgill (2011), a number of studies in sociolinguistic typology have suggested that the proportion of L2 speakers in a speech community may serve as an important extra-linguistic control parameter that determines whether L2 learning has lasting effects on linguistic features in situations of language contact (Bentz & Winter, 2013;Sessarego, 2015;Sinnemäki & Di Garbo, 2018;Walkden & Breitbarth, 2019). Specifically, high proportions of L2 speakers should affect features which present difficulty in L2 acquisition: in the presence of many L2 speakers, the linguistic input of the following generation of L1 learners will be affected, leading to the loss (sometimes permanent) of the L2-difficult feature from the language.…”

A New Modal Cycle

“…This system uses Minimal Search, a third factor principle. One of the motivating ideas for checking from a higher u-F position to a lower i-F one is that interpretable features are more easily acquired in L1 (Radford 2000;van Gelderen 2011) and L2 (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou 2007) acquisition and retained in situations of language contact (Walkden & Breitbarth 2019). If the features on the verb are what make a tense or aspect interpretable, that explains why participles are acquired early and why the auxiliaries that accompany them are acquired later.…”