Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable

Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing at the University of Sussex. He has held positions at SOAS and LSE and at the universities of Oxford, Lancaster, and Leeds, where he was Professor of Linguistics from 1985-1990. His recent books include Empirical Linguistics and The 'Language Instinct' Debate (Continuum 2001 and 2005), and Love Songs of Early China (Shaun Tyas, 2006). David Gil is Scientific Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He has held positions at UCLA, the University of Tel Aviv, and at the National University of Singapore. He is co-editor of The World Atlas of Language Structure (OUP, 2005) and author of numerous articles in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry and Linguistics. Peter Trudgill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Fribourg. He previously held chairs at the Universities of Lausanne, Essex, and Reading. He is also Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University, Adjunct Professor at Agder University, and Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia. His books include Dialects in Contact (Blackwell, 1986), Sociolinguistics (fourth edition, Penguin 2000), and New-dialect formation: on the inevitability of colonial Englishes (Edinburgh, 2004).

An interesting, well researched and engagingly written contribution.

• 1. A Linguistic Axiom Challenged ; 2. How Much grammar Does it Take to Sail a Boat? ; 3. On the Evolution of Complexity - Sometimes Less is More in East and Mainland Southeast Asia ; 4. Testing the Assumption of Complexity Invariance: The Case of Elfdalian and Swedish ; 5. Between Simplification and Complexification: Non-standard Varieties of English Around the World ; 6. Implicational Hierarchies and Grammatical Complexity ; 7. Sociolinguistic Typology and Complexification ; 8. Linguistic Complexity: A Comprehensive Definition and Survey ; 9. Complexity in Core Argument Marking and Population Size ; 10. Oh noo!: A Bewilderingly Multifunctional Saramaccan Word Teaches us How a Creole Language Develops Complexity ; 11. Orality Versus Literacy as a Dimension of Complexity ; 12. Individual Differences in Processing complex Grammatical Structures ; 13. Origin and Maintenance of Clausal Embedding Complexity ; 14. Layering of Grammar: Vestiges of Protosyntax in Present-day Languages ; 15. An Interview With Dan Everett ; 16. Universals in Language or Cognition? Evidence from English Languae Acquisition and from Piraha ; 17. "Overall Complexity" - a Wild Goose Chase? ; 18. An Efficiency Theory of Complexity and Related Phenomena ; 19. Envoi ; References ; Index