FRIAS Colloquium - Peter Arkadiev

Getting to grips with “linguistic complexity” from a cross-linguistic perspective

The notions “complex” and “complexity” have been current in linguistics ever since its advent as a scientific discipline in the early 19^th century, but even until now there is no consensus regarding how “linguistic complexity” is to be defined, measured and compared across languages. Still, recent decades have witnessed a considerable progress in understanding “linguistic complexity”, much of which is associated with the idea that instead of trying to assess the “complexity” of a linguistic system as a whole, it is more fruitful to measure and compare “complexities” of individual subsystems (e.g. inflectional morphology) and even concrete phenomena. In my talk I shall first discuss the different understandings of “linguistic complexity” (e.g. “relative complexity” vs. “absolute complexity”) and the difficulties arising when one attempts do define and measure “complexity” in a holistic fashion. Second, I shall discuss how the cross-linguistic differences in the domain of the so-called “dependent-marking” and “head-marking” (the topic of my FRIAS project) exemplify different parameters of grammatical “complexity”.