Phylogenetic exploration of language complexity in Austronesian, Bantu, and Indo-European Language Families

Abstract

While language complexity has received attention from sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and computational perspectives, the processes of simplification and complexification over time remain challenging to examine and explain. One strand of research focuses on complexity ‘tradeoffs’ and ‘local complexity’ asking whether complexification in one grammatical domain necessitates simplification in another so that all languages are ‘equi-complex’ (Miestamo, 2009, Sinnemäki, 2008). The tradeoffs may or may not occur between different language systems, such as phonetics and morphology (Shosted, 2006), morphology and syntax (Dahl, 2009, Sinnemäki, 2008), morphosyntax and vocabulary size (Reali et al., 2018), and morphosyntax and semantics (Bisang, 2009).