Complexity, Isolation, and Variation
Description
Complexity of grammatical structure has become a center of interest in recent typological and dialectological research. The contributions of the present volume discuss structural complexity from the perspective of language variation and change. Particular attention is paid to the hypothesis that languages and varieties spoken by small, isolated communities tend to display greater complexity than others.
Reviews / Votes
"Der Sammelband bündelt gewinnbringend empirische Ergebnisse und methodologische Erkenntnisse zur Komplexitätsrelevanz von Sprachkontakt."
Saskia Grandel in: Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, 85/2 (2018), 246-249
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Persons
Raffaela Baechler and Guido Seiler , LMU Munich, Germany.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Introduction
- Inflectional complexity of nouns, adjectives and articles in closely related (non-)isolated varieties
- On the origins of complexity: evidence from Germanic
- An information-theoretic approach to assess linguistic complexity
- On complexity of interrogative syntax in Northern Italian dialects
- Complex edges, transparent frontiers: grammatical complexity and language spreads
- A true split? Typological and sociolinguistic considerations on contact intensity effects
- The sociolinguistics of non-equicomplexity
