Correlating Complexity: A Typological Approach

Correlating complexity: a typological approach

Proceeding from the assumption that all languages are equally complex, there exists a corollary, widely held but poorly documented, herein referred to as the negative correlation hypothesis. It states: if one component of language is simplified then another must be elaborated. Here, this assumption is reformulated in terms of a scientific hypothesis and subjected to statistical analysis. Thirty...

A Quantitative and Typological Approach to Correlating Linguistic Complexity

The equal complexity hypothesis states that "all human languages are equally complex" (Bane, 2008). Menzerath's law is well-known for explaining the phenomenon of selfregulation in phonology: "the more sounds in a syllable the smaller their relative length" (Altmann, 1980). Altmann, who made the mathematical formula of this law (Forns and Ferrer-i-Cancho, 2009), assumed that it can be applied t...

Morphological Complexity: a typological perspective

Correlating phonological complexity: data and validation

In a sample of a large number of languages an overall positive correlation between increasing complexity of the maximal syllable structure and the mean number of consonants in the inventory is found. The generality of this result is tested by examining the extent to which it is replicated across continent-sized subgroups of the sampled languages. A resampling technique is applied using small ra...

Segmentation and Clustering of Textual Sequences: a Typological Approach

The long term goal of this research is to develop a program able to produce an automatic segmentation and categorization of textual sequences into discourse types. In this preliminary contribution, we present the construction of an algorithm which takes a segmented text as input and attempts to produce a categorization of sequences, such as narrative, argumentative, descriptive and so on. Also,...