Spoken languages exhibit an inverse complexity trade-off between morphology and syntax
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Recent linguistic studies are divided on the inverse complexity trade-off, with some research finding support or interconnectedness between morphology and syntax, while other cross-linguistic analyses report the absence of such a trade-off.
Abstract In linguistics, there is little consensus on how to define, measure, and compare complexity across languages. We propose to take the diversity of viewpoints as a given, and to capture the complexity of a language by a vector of measurements, rather than a single value. We then assess the statistical support for two controversial hypotheses: the trade-off hypothesis and the equi-complexity hypothesis. We furnish meta-analyses of 28 complexity metrics applied to texts written in overall 80 typologically diverse languages. The trade-off hypothesis is partially supported, in the sense that around one third of the significant correlations between measures are negative. The equi-complexity hypothesis, on the other hand, is largely confirmed. While we find evidence for complexity differences in the domains of morphology and syntax, the overall complexity vectors of languages turn out virtually indistinguishable.
The hypothesis that all languages are equally complex often invokes a trade-off principle, according to which if a language is more complex in one particular domain, it will be simpler in another different domain. In this paper, we use data from WALS to test the existence of a trade-off between two specific domains: morphology and syntax. Contrary to widespread views, we did not find a negative correlation between these two language domains, but in fact a positive correlation. At the same time, this positive correlation seems to be driven by some language families, and it disappears when one considers purely morphological and purely syntactic features only. We discuss these findings in relation to ongoing research about language complexity, and in particular, the effects of factors external to language on linguistic structure.
Bantu languages represent a typical example of how morphology and syntax are deeply intertwined. Indeed, these agglutinative languages employ affixes, hence morphemes, to express relations that in other languages—like Italian or English—are conveyed by independent words, in syntax. In particular, in this work, I am going to discuss Bantu causative and applicative constructions, which are formed by means of verbal extensions, i.e., affixes that adjoin to verb stems in order to derive complex syntactic structures. Through the comparison with other languages, in particular Italian and English, we will argue that a biclausal analysis of Bantu causatives is tenable and, even more, this analysis can be extended to applicative and ditransitive verbs, taking into consideration the different behaviour of symmetrical and asymmetrical Bantu languages. Finally, we will discuss the peculiar situation of Italian, which behaves like symmetrical Bantu languages as concerns object pronominalization in the complex constructions under analysis; we will conclude that the co-occurrence of clitic pronouns is linked to their different morphological forms, which suggests that they occupy different positions in the clitic/affix string, underlying once more how morphology and syntax feed each other.
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