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.
2024. The absence of a trade-off between morphological and syntactic complexity. Frontiers in Language Sciences 3
Chen, Sihan, David Gil, Sergey Gaponov, Jana Reifegerste, Tessa Yuditha, Tatiana Tatarinova, Ljiljana Progovac, Antonio Benítez-Burraco & Marcus Perlman
2024. Linguistic correlates of societal variation: A quantitative analysis. PLOS ONE 19:4 ► pp. e0300838 ff.
2023. Why we need a gradient approach to word order. Linguistics 61:4 ► pp. 825 ff.
Lian, Yuchen, Arianna Bisazza & Tessa Verhoef
2023. Communication Drives the Emergence of Language Universals in Neural Agents: Evidence from the Word-order/Case-marking Trade-off. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 11 ► pp. 1033 ff.
Shcherbakova, Olena, Volker Gast, Damián E. Blasi, Hedvig Skirgård, Russell D. Gray & Simon J. Greenhill
2023. A quantitative global test of the complexity trade-off hypothesis: the case of nominal and verbal grammatical marking. Linguistics Vanguard 9:s1 ► pp. 155 ff.
Sinnemäki, Kaius & Viljami Haakana
2023. Head and dependent marking and dependency length in possessive noun phrases: a typological study of morphological and syntactic complexity. Linguistics Vanguard 9:s1 ► pp. 45 ff.
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.
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
Forker, Diana
2021. Complexity and Its Relation to Variation. Frontiers in Communication 6
Levshina, Natalia
2020. Efficient trade-offs as explanations in functional linguistics: some problems and an alternative proposal. Revista da ABRALIN► pp. 1 ff.
Levshina, Natalia
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
Sinnemäki, Kaius
2020. Linguistic system and sociolinguistic environment as competing factors in linguistic variation: A typological approach. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 6:2
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.
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.
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