[Lingtyp] Structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity

[bingfu Lu]

I think the gerenal preference for noun-adjective order is due to that adjective has a strong property of predicate.One interesting thing is why some major langueges such as English, Chinese, Russian (which is of rich morphology and with rather free word order) take adjective-noun order?Bingfu Lu

 

 
      From: Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu>
 To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org 
 Sent: Sunday, January 17, 2016 12:41 AM
 Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity
   
  For the record, the Greenberg’s suggestion that verb-initial languages tend to prefer noun-adjective order more than SVO or verb-final languages turns out to be an artifact of Greenberg’s small sample.  As I showed in     Dryer, Matthew S. 1988  “Object-Verb Order and Adjective-Noun Order: Dispelling a Myth.” Lingua 74: 185-217.    and    Dryer, Matthew S. 1992  “The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations.”  Language  68: 81-138.    there is no relationship between the order of adjective and noun and the order of object and verb. There is a preference for noun-adjective order among verb-initial languages, but there is the same preference among SVO and verb-final languages.    Nor, as I showed in my 1992 paper, is there any tendency for languages to exhibit consistent ordering of heads and dependents.    Matthew Dryer 
 #yiv6412384249 #yiv6412384249 -- _filtered #yiv6412384249 {font-family:Times;panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;} _filtered #yiv6412384249 {} _filtered #yiv6412384249 {}#yiv6412384249 #yiv6412384249 p.yiv6412384249MsoNormal, #yiv6412384249 li.yiv6412384249MsoNormal, #yiv6412384249 div.yiv6412384249MsoNormal {margin:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;font-size:12.0pt;}#yiv6412384249 .yiv6412384249MsoChpDefault {} _filtered #yiv6412384249 {margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt;}#yiv6412384249 div.yiv6412384249WordSection1 {}#yiv6412384249 On 1/16/16 7:03 AM, Alan Rumsey wrote:
 
 
#yiv6412384249 #yiv6412384249 -- _filtered #yiv6412384249 {font-family:Arial;panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;} _filtered #yiv6412384249 {font-family:Arial;panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;} _filtered #yiv6412384249 {font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;}#yiv6412384249 #yiv6412384249 p.yiv6412384249MsoNormal, #yiv6412384249 li.yiv6412384249MsoNormal, #yiv6412384249 div.yiv6412384249MsoNormal {margin:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;font-size:12.0pt;}#yiv6412384249 .yiv6412384249MsoChpDefault {font-family:Cambria;} _filtered #yiv6412384249 {margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt;}#yiv6412384249 div.yiv6412384249WordSection1 {}#yiv6412384249  Dear All,   Francesca Merlan and I are currently working on a paper on structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity. It is based on results from our longitudinal study of children’s acquisition of two verb constructions in the Papuan language Ku Waru, namely, serial verb constructions (SVC) and adjunct+verb constructions (AVC). We show that children learn the AVC before the SVC, and argue  that this is determined in part by the greater congruence between AVC and other basic aspects of Ku Waru syntax including its strictly verb-final word order. This has got us thinking about the general issue of structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity. For example, long ago Greenberg demonstrated that there is a very strong tendency in languages with VSO word order for the adjective in NPs to follow the noun. This is presumably because there is a kind of congruence between the noun as the head of the NP and the verb as the head of the clause – an insight which led to Nichols’ later very useful typological distinction between head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. Not all languages conform to  Greenburg’s generalization in this regard. But we would argue that those that do are in that respect simpler than those that don’t, because both the VSO template and the noun-adjective one can be specified in terms of a more general relationship between heads and dependents. So far in our search through the recent literature on linguistic  complexity we haven’t come across any discussion of this kind of congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity. Can any of you point us to any? Or to other relevant data for a comparative consideration of this issue?   Alan Rumsey, Australian National University    
  
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