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<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><font face="Times New Roman">Hi Alan,</font></span></p>
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<font face="Times New Roman"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">I don’t know how useful you will find an excursus into<b>
</b></span><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><a title="Generative linguistics" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_linguistics"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">generative linguistics</span></a>
but generativists have something called the <b>Principles and parameters</b> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">
framework</b> which corresponds in most respects to the head-directionality principle described by Nichols and which (following generative logic) has profound implications for the simplicity aka learnability of a language.
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<font face="Times New Roman"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Within the PP framework, the
<a title="Syntax" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">syntax</span></a> of a
<a title="Natural language" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language">
<span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">language</span></a> is described in terms of general
<i>principles</i> (or abstract rules) and specific <i>parameters</i> (i.e. markers or switches) that for particular languages can be either turned
<i>on</i> or turned <i>off</i>. The position of <a title="Head (linguistics)" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_(linguistics)">
<span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">heads</span></a> in phrases is determined by such a parameter. The notion of such a ‘switch’ makes sense to me as in learning Turkish or Japanese (or Mekeo), I found I only had to
cope with the novelty of head-final word order once; after that the general ordering principle becomes quite natural and expected.</span></font></p>
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<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;"><font face="Times New Roman">The Principles and Parameters framework, qua research program, has set out to explain the gap between linguistic
knowledge and linguistic competency. I.e., given the </font><a title="Poverty of the stimulus" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><font face="Times New Roman">finite,
corrupt or incomplete input</font></span></a><font face="Times New Roman"> children have access to, how do they so rapidly arrive at a (fairly) accurate and complete grammatical competence. Principles and parameters are here held to be part of
</font><a title="Universal grammar" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><font face="Times New Roman">universal grammar</font></span></a><font face="Times New Roman">
(UG) and are thus ‘innate’ – at least as potential. Hence they do not need to be learned by exposure to any given natural language. Exposure
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">triggers</i></b> the appropriate parameters, causing the brain to adopt certain ‘settings’, e.g., it might be set to expect and produce either head-final or dependent final structures
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">across the board</i>. I don’t know how they account for the kinds of exceptions to the general rule of directionality that most grammars of natural languages exhibit. Perhaps someone else can help.</font></span></p>
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<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;"><font face="Times New Roman">Alan</font></span></p>
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<p>Alan Jones, PhD,</p>
<p>Adjunct Professor,</p>
<p>Macquarie University,</p>
<p>Sydney<br>
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<div id="divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><font color="#000000" face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt;"><b>From:</b> Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Alan Rumsey <Alan.Rumsey@anu.edu.au><br>
<b>Sent:</b> Sunday, 17 January 2016 2:03 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [Lingtyp] Structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity</font>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">Dear All,</span></p>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">Francesca Merlan and I are currently working on a paper on structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity. It is based on
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">results from our longitudinal study of children’s acquisition of two verb constructions in the Papuan language
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">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.
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">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</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;"> 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?</span></p>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">Alan Rumsey,</span></p>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;">Australian National University</span><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial;"></span></b></p>
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