[Corpora-List] Why some languages has complex morphology meanwhile other not?

[Charles Hall]

This issue was one of the standard topics in historical linguistics, which, sadly, has fallen out of favor in universities.

There is often a "cycle" in which syntax becomes morphology.

For example, it's assumed that the 'weak' past tense morpheme -ed in English [and the other Germanic languages] began as the syntactic "did" following a verbal when the normal word order was

SOV

I thinking did.

now many dialects of English have lost the tense markers and have only aspect... the cycle continues....

If you are interested in this cycle, simply look at the standard texts on historical linguistics.




*************

Charles Hall, Ph.D., dr.h.c.

University of Memphis, Department of English

Applied Linguistics and EFL/ESL

901.313.4496



www.charleshall.info       www.l4law.org

--- On Mon, 12/12/11, Graham White <graham at eecs.qmul.ac.uk> wrote:

From: Graham White <graham at eecs.qmul.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Why some languages has complex morphology meanwhile other not?
To: corpora at uib.no
Date: Monday, December 12, 2011, 1:06 PM

I suspect a lot of it is simply random drift: languages have to put 
their complexity somewhere, but there is a lot of choice as to where 
they put it. French, for example, has lost the noun inflections which
Latin has, but it's acquired a complex system of clitics, which
Latin doesn't have. And even English, though it's not as morphologically 
complex as its predecessors, has a very complex
tense and aspect system (which non-native speakers seem to find
very hard to acquire). People tend to notice morphological complexity
because it's fairly visible, but there are many other ways of being
complex which aren't so obvious at first sight.

Graham

On 12/12/11 11:27, Grzegorz Chrupała wrote:
> Dear Majid,
>
> On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 13:52, Majid Laali<mjlaali at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Dear Corpora List,
>>
>> I am working on developing an stemmer/lemmatization system for Persian.
>> However, I am curious to know why some languages like Persian, Turkish,
>> Chinese have complex morphology system, meanwhile other languages like
>> English have much more simpler morphology system.
>
> Actually Chinese has virtually no morphology. Persian morphology is
> also relatively simple compared to many other languages (e.g. Slavic).
>
>> In other hand, is there
>> any criteria caused such difference like their historical change, their
>> lexicon properties, or their type (Indo-European, or more specific type like
>> Romance)?
>>
>
> There is usually a trade-off between complexity in the morphology and
> complexity in the syntax. Regarding historical origins, one factor
> causing a simplification of morphology seems to be creolization. But
> of course it is only one of many factors.
>
> Best,
> --
> Grzegorz
>
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