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

[Guillaume Jacques]

Dear Alan,

Concerning another type of structural congruence, namely VO/OV order and
prefixing / suffixing verbal morphology, we know that strongly prefixing
verb final languages are fairly rare; as far as I know, only Athabaskan,
Siouan and the Gyalrongic branch of the Sino-Tibetan family share this
characteristic (also North-West Caucasian and Ienissean, but languages of
these two families are not strictly verb-final).

An interesting question is whether this rarity results from a
psycholinguistic dispreference against the prefixing+verb final combination
(such grammars would be less easily learnable, more "complex" in some way
-- thus relevant to your question), or whether this is simply the result of
historical contingency. This question is discussed, mainly on the basis of
data from Gyalrongic languages, in the following article (and the
references therein):

Jacques, Guillaume 2013. Harmonization and disharmonization of affix
ordering and basic word order. *Linguistic Typology*, 17.2:187–215.
http://www.academia.edu/2008163/Harmonization_and_disharmonization_of_affix_ordering_and_basic_word_order

It seems to me that all languages with prefixing verbal morphology and
verb-final order all have a relatively more complex (less transparent)
morphology that the average verb final suffixing languages, though this
remains to be demonstrated with quantitative data.

Best regard,

Guillaume

2016-01-16 16:03 GMT+01:00 Alan Rumsey <Alan.Rumsey at anu.edu.au>:

> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
>


-- 
Guillaume Jacques
CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO
http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques
http://himalco.hypotheses.org/
http://panchr.hypotheses.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20160116/3e8e8c74/attachment.htm>