MLU counts

[Sheri Wells Jensen]

Hi, Folks,

Didn't Joseph Greenberg write something in the late fifties or early
sixties in which he tried to count morphemes and compare complexity across
languages?  Sorry to be so vague, but all I really remember about the
article was that it was interesting and somewhat involved.  I've searched
but can no longer reconstruct the reference to the original work.  Does
anyone know the article I'm thinking about?

Sheri
Sheri


At 10:51 AM 2/18/04 -0500, you wrote:
>Dear Nina, Yonata, and Info-CHILDES,
>   The discussion of how to handle MLU in morphologically rich languages has
>been on the table since the 1960s without any real resolution.  Yonata's
>guidelines seem to reflect current state of the art and seem just about
>right.  However, it seems to me that people working with morphologically
>rich languages should really compute two indices.  The first would not be
>cross-linguistically meaningful, but would be maximally meaningful within
>the language.  That index would count morphemes in terms of what they
>express.  Here, you still may wish to be a bit conservative.  For example,
>do you really want to count the German article "die" as four morphemes
>(definite, case, number, gender)?  I would say not.  Maybe two morphemes
>would be about right (definiteness and case-number-gender).
>   The second MLU for morphologically rich languages should be constructed on
>the basis of a real comparative program of research.  Comparing normal
>children of similar ages in similar urban (or rural) environments and
>similar (mutually culturally relevant) activities, can you come up with a
>method of scoring that yields parallel counts across morphologically rich
>language (Hebrew, Inuktitut, Hungarian) and an analytic one (English,
>Chinese).  As far as I can tell no one has yet attempted this obviously
>important but perfectly feasible study.
>
>--Brian MacWhinney


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Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen
Bowling Green State University
MA TESL  Program
http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/tesl/

Office: 423 East Hall
(419) 372-8935
Homepage: http://personal.bgsu.edu/~swellsj/
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