I have argued in various presentations that it is inherent to natural grammars to maintain a considerable level of complexity over time: simplifications occur, but are counterbalanced by complexifications due to grammaticalization, reanalysis, and new patterns created by phonetic erosion. I argue that only extensive acquisition by adults makes grammars simplify to a significant overall degree. Creoles are the extreme case, but languages like English, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, and Indonesian are less complex than their sister languages to a degree that correlates with their extensive histories of non-native acquisition at certain points on their timelines. In this paper I address a few cases in Indonesia that challenge my stipulation. The grammatical simplicity of Riau Indonesian and the languages of East Timor is due to adult acquisition. Meanwhile, a few completely analytic languages on Flores suggest either that my stipulation must be taken as a tendency, or that we can take the nature of the languages as spurs for investigating sociological disruption in the past.
2024. The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia,
Awwad, Mousa, Marwan Jarrah & Ekab Al-Shawashreh
2023. The discourse uses of the verb dire ‘to say’ in Vernacular French: A corpus-based exploration. Cogent Arts & Humanities 10:1
Solovyev, Valery Dmitrievich, Marina Ivanovna Solnyshkina & Danielle S. McNamara
2022. Computational linguistics and discourse complexology: Paradigms and research methods. Russian Journal of Linguistics 26:2 ► pp. 275 ff.
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.
2017. Dialects of Malay/Indonesian. In The Handbook of Dialectology, ► pp. 571 ff.
Liu, Haiyong
2014. Word Order Change in Mandarin Chinese from the Perspective of Syntactic Typology and Universals - A Case Study of the Ba + Gei Structure. Journal of Universal Language 15:2 ► pp. 77 ff.
Monville-Burston, Monique
2013. Complexité et transfert dans l'acquisition du français langue étrangère : le cas des apprenants chypriotes du FLE. Travaux de linguistique n°66:1 ► pp. 97 ff.
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