Givon on PirahaN and universals

[Clai Rice]

Jagdish Jain wrote:
> 
> I would like to emphasize that a "complex linguistic construction" 
> (whatever that means) may not involve any recursion. Nobody 
> has suggested any metric for "complexity" of a linguistic 
> construction.

Attempts to measure linguistic complexity have been a cottage industry in
linguistics for some time, very important to subfields like 1st/2nd language
acquisition, creolistics, clinical applications, and reading. A well known
proposal specifically for mesauring the complexity of a lingustic
construction would be Gibson's dependency locality theory:
Edward Gibson, Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies,
Cognition 68 (1998) 1-76. He also wrote an entry on this in the Encyclopedia
of Cognitive Science.

--Clai Rice