Why Does Language Complexity Resist Measurement?

Joseph, John E.

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.624855

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 20 publications

(12 reference statements)

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“…Needless to say, the fact that heated debates have been flourishing for at least two decades suggests that these assumptions have led to multiple interpretations of how complexity should be defined and how it should be considered, and consequently that the complexity jigsaw puzzle has still to be solved. Several contributions to this Research Topic specifically address these aspects, e.g., Ehret et al (2021) on the equal complexity aspect, or Ehret et al (2021) and Joseph (2021) on measuring complexity, to name just a few. Another heated debate is about the existence of putative complexity trade-offs within each language (i.e., do phonological, morphological, and syntactic complexities interact and compensate or combine?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interindividual Variation Refuses to Go Away: A Bayesian Computer Model of Language Change in Communicative Networks

et al. 2021

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Treating the speech communities as homogeneous entities is not an accurate representation of reality, as it misses some of the complexities of linguistic interactions. Inter-individual variation and multiple types of biases are ubiquitous in speech communities, regardless of their size. This variation is often neglected due to the assumption that “majority rules,” and that the emerging language of the community will override any such biases by forcing the individuals to overcome their own biases, or risk having their use of language being treated as “idiosyncratic” or outright “pathological.” In this paper, we use computer simulations of Bayesian linguistic agents embedded in communicative networks to investigate how biased individuals, representing a minority of the population, interact with the unbiased majority, how a shared language emerges, and the dynamics of these biases across time. We tested different network sizes (from very small to very large) and types (random, scale-free, and small-world), along with different strengths and types of bias (modeled through the Bayesian prior distribution of the agents and the mechanism used for generating utterances: either sampling from the posterior distribution [“sampler”] or picking the value with the maximum probability [“MAP”]). The results show that, while the biased agents, even when being in the minority, do adapt their language by going against their a priori preferences, they are far from being swamped by the majority, and instead the emergent shared language of the whole community is influenced by their bias.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interindividual Variation Refuses to Go Away: A Bayesian Computer Model of Language Change in Communicative Networks

et al. 2021

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“…3 Ciertamente, existe una viva discusión acerca de en qué sentido las lenguas pueden considerarse objetos complejos, de si difieren unas de otras en términos de su complejidad absoluta (de modo que pueda haber lenguas más simples que otras) o si dichas diferencias son relativas (de manera que unas lenguas puedan ser más complejas en ciertos niveles y más simples en otros) y, finalmente, del modo más apropiado de cuantificar dicha complejidad (sobre estas cuestiones, véase Szmrecsanyi, 2015;Miestamo, 2017;Joseph, 2021;Ehret et al, 2023, entre otros muchos). En las obras seminales de las que hemos extraído la caracterización básica de las sociedades y las lenguas esotéricas o exotéricas que presentamos en este apartado, el concepto complejidad no se trata de un modo tan técnico.…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

De la variación tipológica a la variación intralingüística (y viceversa): el caso de los familectos

Benítez‐Burraco¹,

Arquiola²

2023

Preprint

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Los estudios de tipología sociolingüística sugieren que diversos factores sociopolíticos podrían explicar parte de los rasgos estructurales de las lenguas y en particular, en qué dominios resultan más complejas o más simples. Así, las lenguas habladas por sociedades cerradas (denominadas esotéricas) presentan una fonología y una morfología más compleja y una menor transparencia semántica, mientras que las usadas por sociedades abiertas (o exotéricas) manifiestan una mayor complejidad sintáctica y un mayor grado de composicionalidad semántica. En este artículo se defiende la utilidad de considerar este tipo de trabajos para una mejor comprensión de la variación intralingüística, el objeto principal de interés de la sociolingüística (sobre todo, la variacionista). En concreto, se propone extender el ámbito de aplicación de los conceptos esotérico y exotérico al estudio de la variación social del español. Para ilustrar un programa de análisis de este tipo se discute el caso de los familectos, esto es, las variedades de la lengua asociadas a las unidades familiares. Se propone un protocolo de análisis de estas variedades, que incluye una lista de rasgos estructurales de interés definidos a partir de la hipótesis de que los familectos pueden describirse e interpretarse satisfactoriamente en términos de usos esotéricos de la lengua estándar.

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Situational diversity and linguistic complexity

Grieve

2022

Linguistics Vanguard

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In this paper, I introduce a situational approach to the study of linguistic complexity. As opposed to most research on linguistic complexity, which has focused on the grammatical complexity of languages, I consider this topic from a situational perspective. I make two proposals. First, I claim that languages can vary in their situational diversity. Languages that have been adapted for a wider range of communicative contexts are more situationally complex than languages that have been adapted for a narrower range of communicative contexts. To support this claim, I consider examples of situational diversity from across a range of different languages and varieties of languages, drawing on empirical research from linguistics and anthropology. Second, I claim that situational diversity can help explain variation in grammatical complexity. I propose that increasing situational diversity in a language over time should lead to decreasing grammatical complexity. Furthermore, I argue that this trade-off between situational and grammatical complexity could explain how overall linguistic complexity could be maintained across languages and over time.

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Why Does Language Complexity Resist Measurement?

Cited by 5 publications

References 20 publications

Interindividual Variation Refuses to Go Away: A Bayesian Computer Model of Language Change in Communicative Networks

Interindividual Variation Refuses to Go Away: A Bayesian Computer Model of Language Change in Communicative Networks

De la variación tipológica a la variación intralingüística (y viceversa): el caso de los familectos

Situational diversity and linguistic complexity

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