Easterday Shelece, Stave Matthew, Allassonnière-Tang Marc, Seifart Frank
Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai'i Mãnoa, Honolulu, HI, United States.
UMR 5596 Dynamique du Langage, Université Lumière Lyon 2 and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon, France.
Front Psychol. 2021 Mar 17;12:638659. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638659. eCollection 2021.
Relationships between phonological and morphological complexity have long been proposed in the linguistic literature, with empirical investigations often seeking complexity trade-offs. Positive complexity correlations tend not to be viewed in terms of motivations. We argue that positive complexity correlations can be diachronically well-motivated, emerging from crosslinguistically prevalent processes of language change. We examine the correlation between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis, hypothesizing that the process of grammaticalization motivates a positive relationship between the two features. To test this, we conduct a typological survey of 95 diverse languages and a corpus study of 21 languages with substantive (predominantly >10,000 words) corpora from the DoReCo project. The first study establishes a significant positive correlation between syllable complexity, measured in terms of maximal syllable patterns, and the index of synthesis (morpheme/word ratio). The second study tests the hypothesis that the relationship between syllable complexity and synthesis holds at local (word-initial and word-final) levels and within noun and verb types, as predicted by a grammaticalization account. While the findings of the corpus study are limited in their statistical power, the observed tendencies are consistent with our predictions. This study contributes important findings to the complexity literature, as well as a novel method which incorporates broad typological sampling and deep corpus analysis.
语音和形态复杂性之间的关系在语言学文献中早已被提出，实证研究常常探寻复杂性的权衡。正向的复杂性关联往往不被从动机角度看待。我们认为正向的复杂性关联在历时层面上可以有充分的动机，源自跨语言普遍存在的语言变化过程。我们考察音节复杂性与形态合成之间的关联，假设语法化过程促使这两个特征之间产生正向关系。为了验证这一点，我们对95种不同语言进行了类型学调查，并对来自DoReCo项目的21种拥有大量语料库（主要超过10000个单词）的语言进行了语料库研究。第一项研究在以最大音节模式衡量的音节复杂性与合成指数（语素/词比率）之间建立了显著的正相关。第二项研究检验了这样一个假设，即如语法化解释所预测的，音节复杂性与合成之间的关系在局部（词首和词尾）层面以及名词和动词类型中成立。尽管语料库研究的结果在统计效力上有限，但观察到的趋势与我们的预测一致。这项研究为复杂性文献贡献了重要发现，以及一种结合广泛类型学抽样和深入语料库分析的新方法。
