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

[Alan Rumsey]

Many thanks to all of you who responded to my posting on this topic, both online and off. All the readings you have pointed me to have indeed been highly relevant and very useful, including an excellent recent publication by Jennifer Culbertson that she pointed me to in her offline response, at http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01964/abstract

Thanks especially to Matthew Dryer for pointing out that the Greenbergian 'universal' I had used as an example - the putative association between VSO and noun-adjective order - had been falsified by his much more thorough 1992 study "The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations".  My reading of that article and further correspondence with him has confirmed that, by contrast, Greenberg's universals no 3 and 4 were solidly confirmed by his study, namely that SOV languages are far more likely to have postpositions than prepositions and that the reverse is true for VSO  languages.

Drawing on all your suggestions, Francesca and I have now finished a draft of the paper referred to in my posting, called 'Structural Congruence as a Dimension of Language Complexity: An Example from Ku Waru Child Language'. If any of you would like to read it please let me know and I'll send it to you.

Alan
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