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Measuring Grammatical Complexity
This book collects Work presented at a workshop entitled ‘Formal Linguistics and the Measurement of Grammatical Complexity’, held in Seattle, WA, USA on March 23–24, 2012. Each chapter takes on the question of whether languages can differ in grammatical complexity and, if so, how relative complexity differences might be measured. In this way, it differs from other recent collections on complexity which approach the issue for the most part from a sociolinguistic or functional/typological perspective and make few concrete proposals about the actual measurement of complexity differences. The individual chapters either take a ‘grammar-based’ approach to complexity or a ‘user-based’ one, or contrast the two. The former focus on elements of grammars per se and count the amount of structural elaboration, irregularity, and so on. The latter approach complexity in terms of the degree of difficulty for the user, whether the first-language acquirer, the second-language acquirer, or the adult user. The book deals for the most part with morphosyntactic complexity, though there are chapters devoted to phonological and semantic complexity as well. Particularly noteworthy are two chapters that approach complexity from a neurolinguistics perspective, raising the question of whether we can learn anything about grammatical complexity from neurolinguistics studies.
