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

[Alan Rumsey]

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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