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

[Majid Laali]

Dear all, 

Thank you for your elaborate responds. It is help me much to continue my research.

Regards,
Majid Laali,
Natural Language and text Processing Laboratory(http://ece.ut.ac.ir/NLP),
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
m.laali at ut.ac.ir



On Dec 12, 2011, at 4:20 PM, Charles Hall wrote:

> 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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