Part of
Language Complexity: Typology, contact, changeEdited by Matti Miestamo, Kaius Sinnemäki and Fred Karlsson
[Studies in Language Companion Series 94] 2008
► pp. 67–88
Edited by Matti Miestamo, Kaius Sinnemäki and Fred Karlsson
[Studies in Language Companion Series 94] 2008
► pp. 67–88
Complexity trade-offs in core argument marking
Languages have often been claimed to trade off complexity in one area with simplicity in another. The present paper tests this claim with a complexity metric based on the functional load of different coding strategies (head/dependent marking and word order) that interact in core argument marking. Data from a sample of 50 languages showed that the functional use of word order had a statistically significant inverse dependency with the presence of morphological marking, especially with dependent marking. Most other dependencies were far from statistical significance and in fact provide evidence against the trade-off claim, leading to its rejection as a general all-encompassing principle. Overall, languages seem to adhere more strongly to distinctiveness than to economy.
Cited by
Cited by 15 other publications
Andrason, Alexander
2021. Сашко-lect: The translanguaged grammar of a hyper multilingual global nomad. Part 3 – Contact languages and translanguaging. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 138:3 ► pp. 119 ff. 
Andrason, Alexander, John Sullivan & Justyna Olko
Bisazza, Arianna, Ahmet Üstün & Stephan Sportel
2021. On the Difficulty of Translating Free-Order Case-Marking Languages. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 9 ► pp. 1233 ff.
Easterday, Shelece, Matthew Stave, Marc Allassonnière-Tang & Frank Seifart
2021. Syllable Complexity and Morphological Synthesis: A Well-Motivated Positive Complexity Correlation Across Subdomains. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Fedzechkina, Maryia, Elissa L. Newport & T. Florian Jaeger
2017. Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking. Cognitive Science 41:2 ► pp. 416 ff.
Foltz, Anouschka
2022. Chapter 3. Beyond the English passive. In Syntactic Priming in Language Acquisition [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 31], ► pp. 35 ff.
Forker, Diana
2021. Complexity and Its Relation to Variation. Frontiers in Communication 6
Jon-And, Anna, Elliot Aguilar & Nicholas Greatorex Riches
2019. A model of contact-induced language change: Testing the role of second language speakers in the evolution of Mozambican Portuguese. PLOS ONE 14:4 ► pp. e0212303 ff.
Levshina, Natalia
2020. Efficient trade-offs as explanations in functional linguistics: some problems and an alternative proposal. Revista da ABRALIN ► pp. 1 ff.
2021. Cross-Linguistic Trade-Offs and Causal Relationships Between Cues to Grammatical Subject and Object, and the Problem of Efficiency-Related Explanations. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Malchukov, Andrej L.
Shcherbakova, Olena, Volker Gast, Damián E. Blasi, Hedvig Skirgård, Russell D. Gray & Simon J. Greenhill
2022. A quantitative global test of the complexity trade-off hypothesis: the case of nominal and verbal grammatical marking. Linguistics Vanguard 0:0
Sinnemäki, Kaius
2020. Linguistic system and sociolinguistic environment as competing factors in linguistic variation: A typological approach. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 6:2
Sinnemäki, Kaius & Viljami Haakana
2022. Head and dependent marking and dependency length in possessive noun phrases: a typological study of morphological and syntactic complexity. Linguistics Vanguard 0:0
Tamaredo, Iván
2018. Pronoun omission in high-contact varieties of English. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 39:1 ► pp. 85 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.