Complexity in language

[Wouter Kusters]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
On Fri, 19 Jun 1998, Isidore Dyen wrote:
 
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> I am responding to what appears below. I gave a paper some time ago at a
> Lacus forum that got published in which I spoke of the equicomplexity of
> languages. The paper proposed the theory that all natural languages were
> equally complex. The consequence is that any change that
> introduces complication anywhere requires a compensatory simplification
> elsewhere nad vice versa. A simple name for what is involved might be the
> equicomplexity principle, but, as I see it, what is involved is a theory,
> since the proposition is an assumption;
 
I wonder in what sense this can be called a theory when what is proposed
is not more than a kind of dogma: All languages must be equally complex.
When it were a theory it would be embedded and connected to other
theories, further it should be falsifiable, which it is probably not. There
are many examples of language changes which are obviously simplifying (cf.
Trudgill 1992, etc. on Scandinavian cases, Werner 1987 on Germanic,
Andersen 1988 on diverse European languages and dialects, Muhlhausler,
Thurston 1992(?) on Melanesian, Versteegh on Arabic varieties, and so on)
But of course if you want to stick to such a kind of 'theory' you can
always claim that 'somewhere' in the grammar, phonology, semantics or
even pragmatics there MUST be an opposite change towards more complexity.
So the theory of equicomplexity is either unfalsifiable either false.
 
Further I would be very interested in a mechanism which can measure the
amount of complexity in a whole language and which can cause the
same amount of complexity to appear or disappear elsewhere. If this
mechanism is anyway connected to the capacity of the brain, I would be
interested in how proponents of the equicomplexity theory handle
bilingualism.
 
 
 
Wouter Kusters
University of Amsterdam