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as a student of languages--and language--years back i came to the intuitive theory that there's some kind of conservation of complexity principle at play in human languages.
like a language that is somehow simpler in one aspect will be more complex in another.
anyone know of any good treatments on this issue? perhaps a psycholinguistic processing load approach or even a more formal information-theoretic one...
(this was inspired by issues raised by Telly and Kip on the pronouns thread, but i think it needs its own thread.)
like a language that is somehow simpler in one aspect will be more complex in another.
anyone know of any good treatments on this issue? perhaps a psycholinguistic processing load approach or even a more formal information-theoretic one...
(this was inspired by issues raised by Telly and Kip on the pronouns thread, but i think it needs its own thread.)
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Re: conservation of complexity for languages?
Mon, May 16, 2005 - 3:08 PMWhat i think you are referring to is a neo-grammarian principle that outlines two concepts of language change- the process of streamlining and the process of restructuring.
Human behavior is subject to the law of least effort insomuch as people re-organize language structure to make speaking easier. This causes constant streamlining of every day sounds and words in order to reduce complexity, which in turn eventually leads to the restructuring of various other systems of language to maintain some semblance of coherent discourse.
so it would seem that the restructuring principle could be termed the law of conservation of complexity in communication.
is this what you were getting at? -
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Re: conservation of complexity for languages?
Thu, May 19, 2005 - 3:55 AMi was in part thinking of the within language stuff you mention. (though the devil-in-the-details is what constitutes "least effort". how to operationalize it enough to come up with a solid theory...)
also, i was thinking of across languages. it'd be neat if there were some metric for language complexity that would show interesting patterning across different languages...(again, the challenge would be in adequately defining the metric...) -
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Re: conservation of complexity for languages?
Thu, May 19, 2005 - 7:48 AMFrankly, i think you are right on target, and that it is sorta "assumed" to be teh case.
It's almost as if it's could be formulaic.
Communication = x.
X=vocab + syntax +level of context +etc., +etc
if one aspect goes up, like a more formalized, techincal, encoded vocab, then the need for context goes down. If you make your word order more flexable, you need to compensate by increasing the level of cases or agreement to keep the sentance/communication "clear".
Is this sorta where you are going?
Some of these paramaters can be quite easily charted. Many languages are quantified on thier vocab, thier level of context. And I'm sure other aspects are as easily found.
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