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

Tue Dec 13 09:28:51 UTC 2011

For a very different (and pop science) but I thought interesting take on 
possible /causes/ of linguistic diversity, see
David Robson, Dec 07 2011, Power of Babel: Why one language isn't 
enough, New Scientist.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228421.200-power-of-babel-why-one-language-isnt-enough.html

Mike

On 13/12/2011 08:35, Majid Laali wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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 <http://www.charleshall.info> www.l4law.org 
>> <http://www.l4law.org>
>>
>> --- On *Mon, 12/12/11, Graham White /<graham at eecs.qmul.ac.uk 
>> <mailto:graham at eecs.qmul.ac.uk>>/* wrote:
>>
>>
>>     From: Graham White <graham at eecs.qmul.ac.uk
>>     <mailto:graham at eecs.qmul.ac.uk>>
>>     Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Why some languages has complex
>>     morphology meanwhile other not?
>>     To: corpora at uib.no <mailto: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 Chrupa?a wrote:
>>     > Dear Majid,
>>     >
>>     > On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 13:52, Majid Laali<mjlaali at gmail.com
>>     <x-msg://365/mc/compose?to=mjlaali@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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-- 
Mike Scott

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