Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable

Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language

by Geoffrey Sampson (Editor), David Gil (Editor), Peter Trudgill (Editor)

This book presents a challenge to the widely-held assumption that human languages are both similar and constant in their degree of complexity. For a hundred years or more the universal equality of languages has been a tenet of faith among most anthropologists and linguists. It has been frequently advanced as a corrective to the idea that some languages are at a later stage of evolution than others. It also appears to be an inevitable outcome of one of the central axioms of generative linguistic that the mental architecture of language is fixed and is thus identical in all languages and that whereas genes evolve languages do not.

Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable reopens the debate. Geoffrey Sampson's introductory chapter re-examines and clarifies the notion and theoretical importance of complexity in language, linguistics, cognitive science, and evolution. Eighteen distinguished scholars from all over the world then look at evidence gleaned from their own research in order to reconsider whether languages do or do not exhibit the same degrees and kinds of complexity. They examine data from a wide range of times and places. They consider the links between linguistic structure and social complexity and relate their findings to the causes and processes of language change. Their arguments are frequently controversial and provocative; their conclusions add up to an important challenge to conventional ideas about the nature of language.

The authors write readably and accessibly with no recourse to unnecessary jargon. This fascinating book will appeal to all those interested in the interrelations between human nature, culture, and language.

Genres: Linguistics, Language

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Samuel Beer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection that addresses a number of different angles from which to view the issue of language complexity as a dynamic entity. In the first article, Sampson challenges the axiom that all languages are equally complex and introduces the remaining articles. Gil then argues that a relatively low level of grammatical complexity relative to what we actually see in the languages of the world is necessary to articulate the full range of concepts that humans "need" to convey--as such, stating that some languages are less complex than others does not suggest that they are impoverished for the purposes of fulfilling their function. Bisang offers something of a defense of the equi-complexity hypothesis by suggesting that simplicity in morphosyntax adds pragmatic complexity. Dahl argues that greater morphological complexity in Elfdalian relative to Swedish is not offset by greater syntactic complexity in Swedish. Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann investigate extent and locus of complexity in four categories of English dialects: low-contact L1, high-contact L1, L2, and pidgin/creole dialects. Miestamo addresses the use of implicational hierarchies in analyzing language complexity, particularly for learning about the interactions between complexity proper and cost/difficulty. Trudgill argues that societal type influences language type: language contact with widespread adult learning leads to simplification, long-term language contact with child learning leads to complexification, "small community size and isolation may promote the spontaneous growth of morphological categories" and maybe of "irregularity, redundancy, and low transparency." Nichols uses a new metric for complexity to argue that the equi-complexity hypothesis is at best a reflection of a statistical tendency for languages to be neither extremely simple nor extremely complex. Sinnemaki finds some correlation between population size and complexity in core argument marking, but identifies some possible confounds. McWhorter offers a case study of a Saramaccan grammatical item, demonstrating how complexity is added to a creole language, but argues that these early accretions of complexity are only first steps toward the overall complexity of older languages. Maas shows that complex sentence structures are products of the development of widely used literacy in the language. I'll maybe briefly summarize the other articles for my own sake later. Some articles were more convincing than others. Some seemed to be beating at straw men. The overall themes that tended to emerge were the influence of social factors on language structure, the futility of pursuing a single metric of "overall complexity", and the difficulty in establishing an intuitive definition of language complexity.