Underestimating Language

Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES
Mon Dec 9 23:59:46 UTC 2002


At 17:26 +0100 9/12/02, Mikael Parkvall wrote:
>No, what I am suggesting is that the same message can be conveyed in a
>difficult way and an easy way (not to mention all the possible shades in
>between). The "junk" features I mentioned, and which Steve cites, do not
>reduce the information value, but they add unnecessary complexity insofar
>as they require one more rule in the ideal grammatical description of the
>language (whether or not this corresponds to an additional burden in
>acquisition or processing is another, albeit related, matter).
>
>In other words, the "simple" language can be said to doe its job more
>efficiently than the "complex" language, provided that they both convey the
>same information.

It seems as if you were not speaking about natural languages, but about some kind of formal or artificial language (which would have an 'ideal grammatical description').
Can you offer some empirical evidence showing, for example, that German children master their language later and/or worse than Jamaican ones?

Regards,
Jose-Luis Mendivil



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