Syllable Complexity and Morphological Synthesis: A Well-Motivated Positive Complexity Correlation Across Subdomains

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Language Evolution
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Linguistic research often explores trade-offs between phonological and morphological complexity.
• Positive correlations between these complexities are typically not explained by underlying motivations.
• Diachronic linguistic change offers a potential explanation for positive complexity correlations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the correlation between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis.
• To test the hypothesis that grammaticalization processes motivate a positive relationship between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis.
• To examine if this relationship holds at local levels and across word types.

Main Methods:

• Conducted a typological survey of 95 diverse languages.
• Performed a corpus study on 21 languages using DoReCo project data.
• Measured syllable complexity via maximal syllable patterns and morphological synthesis via the index of synthesis (morpheme/word ratio).

Main Results:

• A significant positive correlation was found between syllable complexity and the index of synthesis across languages.
• Observed tendencies in the corpus study, though limited in statistical power, were consistent with predictions regarding local levels and word types.
• The findings support the hypothesis that grammaticalization drives the positive relationship between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis.

Conclusions:

• Positive correlations between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis are diachronically motivated by language change processes like grammaticalization.
• The study introduces a novel methodology combining typological sampling and corpus analysis for linguistic research.
• This research contributes to the understanding of linguistic complexity and its evolution.