The general notion of ‘complexity’ is discussed based on foundational ideas by Herbert Simon and Nicholas Rescher. An analytic overview is provided of the ways in which language complexity has been treated in linguistic theories during the past 200 years. The Schlegel brothers, Humboldt, and… read more
There are no grammatical limits on multiple final embedding of clauses. But converging corpus data from English, Finnish, German and Swedish show that multiple final embedding is avoided at levels deeper than three levels from the main clause in syntactically simple varieties, and at levels deeper… read more
The received view is that there are no constraints on clausal embedding complexity in sentences. This hypothesis will be challenged here on empirical grounds from the viewpoint of multiple initial embedding of clauses. The data come from the British National Corpus, Brown, LOB, and philological… read more