Complexity in linguistic theory, language learning and language change

Introduction: Linguistic complexity

“…Dahl 2004;Rescher 1998). Observe here that Odlin's idea of complexity also partially overlaps with Kusters' (2008) idea of outsider complexity, the crucial difference being that while Kusters abstracts away from transfer effects, Odlin is explicitly interested in them. The contribution investigates preposition and article usage in written learner English by native speakers of Finnish and Swedish in Finland, two learner groups with native languages that are typologically quite different (Swedish being related to English, and Finnish not at all), but with minimal cultural differences.…”

“…Thus, Kusters (2003) (see also Kusters 2008) defines complexity as the amount of effort an outsider has to make to become acquainted with the language in question […] an outsider is someone who learns the language in question at a later age, and is not a native speaker. Therefore, phenomena that are relatively difficult for a second language learner in comparison with a first language learner are more complex […] Phenomena that are easy to acquire for a second language learner but difficult for a first language learner are less complex.…”

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“…As argued by Trudgill (2009Trudgill ( , 2011, among others, this is "due to the relative inability of adult humans to learn new languages perfectly" (Trudgill, 2009: 99): in the process of learning a language, adults simplify its grammar by decreasing its redundancy and opacity, regularizing paradigms, and eliminating semantic distinctions coded by different morphological categories. Many different studies have provided evidence to support the claim that language contact results in grammatical simplification due to the influence of L2 acquisition and use (McWhorter, 2001(McWhorter, , 2007Kusters, 2003Kusters, , 2008Parkvall, 2008;Sinnemäki, 2009). However, not all types of contact have this effect.…”

Syntactic complexity and language contact: A corpus-based study of relative clauses in British English and Indian English

“…A further distinction should be made between absolute and relative complexity metrics (Kusters, 2008;Miestamo, 2008). On the one hand, in absolute metrics complexity is understood as an objective property of grammars, which are in turn conceptualized as autonomous entities independent from considerations related to language use.…”

“…Kusters, 2008) by comparing the domain of relative clause formation in British English, a L1 variety, and Indian English, a L2 variety. According to Hawkins (1999), the processing cost of relativizing a noun phrase increases down the Accessibility Hierarchy (Subject > Direct Object> Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive> Object of Comparison) proposed by Keenan and Comrie (1977).…”