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

[Matthew Dryer]

For the record, the Greenberg’s suggestion that verb-initial languages 
tend to prefer noun-adjective order more than SVO or verb-final 
languages turns out to be an artifact of Greenberg’s small sample.As I 
showed in

Dryer, Matthew S. 1988“Object-Verb Order and Adjective-Noun Order: 
Dispelling a Myth.” /Lingua/ 74: 185-217.

and

Dryer, Matthew S. 1992“The Greenbergian Word Order 
Correlations.”/Language/68: 81-138.//

there is no relationship between the order of adjective and noun and the 
order of object and verb. There is a preference for noun-adjective order 
among verb-initial languages, but there is the same preference among SVO 
and verb-final languages.

Nor, as I showed in my 1992 paper, is there any tendency for languages 
to exhibit consistent ordering of heads and dependents.

Matthew Dryer


On 1/16/16 7:03 AM, Alan Rumsey wrote:
>
> 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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