The hornet's nest of grammatical complexity

[jal]

I made the mistake of arguing with some Spanish-speaking guys on Quora about complexity of grammar. They both asserted that English grammar is "basic af" and much simpler than Spanish, and also Chinese grammar is "one of the simplest in the world", like English. When I tried to explain that (as they evidently thought) grammatical gender and conuugations isn't the only measure of complexity, they scolded me for "clearly not understanding the meaning of morhpology and grammar". I just left it at that, but nevertheless, it's an interesting question: do you guys consider English grammar simpler just for lack of gender etc. as compared to e.g. Spanish? Or is my notion that English grammar is just as complex as Spanish, but the complexity just manifests itself elsewhere in the language, correct?


JAL

[Ares Land]

I mean, if you're willing to reduce 'grammar' to 'morphology', than sure. Otherwise not really.
The syntax of English is extremely complex. There's no gender, but English has plenty of non-obvious features of its own. (Phrasal verbs, for instance?)

An added difficulty, I think, is that you have to figure out the rules on your own; your typical English handbook will get into some of the obvious pitfalls but it certainly feels like they leave out most of the syntactic rules.

Besides, verbal morphology makes for impressive tables, but I don't think it's really harder than (say) analytic verb formation.
I don't think memorizing a set of endings is terribly harder or more complex than remembering which auxiliary to use.

The trouble with that question is that there isn't really a good objective measure of grammatical complexity. Besides it creates an arbitrary separation between grammar and lexicon. Is gender a lexical or grammatical feature? How about phrasal verbs? I mean, sure it's easier to learn 'chew out' as an independent lexical items, independant from 'chew'; but people will advocate a similar approach for say, the different Greek verbal stems.

That being said, I think there are languages that certainly feel horribly complex. I don't think any Romance language really belong to that category.

[Jonlang]

I think one's perception of complexity also relies upon your first language and which other languages you've learnt. An L1 Spanish person may look at English's Wikipedia and think it is grammatically simple in comparison to his own Spanish, but may look at other Romance languages and think they're close, in complexity, to Spanish.

Living in Wales, close to the English border, and being a civil servant, I work with many people from all over the UK (but primarily north-east Wales and north-west England) and many of them think Welsh is "too hard", "weird", "scary", "complicated" because 1. it has grammatical gender; 2. the consonant mutations; 3. "it's all backwards" i.e. noun-adjective, VSO. To many people I know Welsh seems ridiculously complex, I really don't think it is. On the other hand, I think Irish is very complex with its different sets of numerals, grammatical cases, broad~slender consonants, its synthetic vs. analytical verbs – but when I finally get the time to delve into it properly it will probably not be as complex as it appears to be.

I think grammatical complexity is too subjective to be able to meaningfully quantify and reliably use to "class" languages accordingly.

[Moose-tache]

Where I'm from, you can say "ain't" as an alternative form of "isn't." You can also used it as a negative form of "have," but only in modal constructions. You can use it as a negative form of "do," but only in marked AAVE speech. Except, White people use it sometimes in negative inversions like "ain't nobody finish on time." These same yokels reinterpreted the participle "got" in "have got" as its own verb alongside "get," as a possessive verb: "He gots a trampoline." But this doesn't work with "gotten," nor is it compatible with the perfect construction that it comes from. There are split subjects and adverbs that squeeze into very specific slots between modals, and of course the two interact in complex ways. We've got "been" perfects, "done" perfects, and multiple pluperfects. We stack our weak past tense endings onto our other weak past tense endings in words like "drownded," or our strong past tense endings, like "chosed." We are "fixin' to" do things in the future, and we "used to could" do things in the past. We put indirect objects on our monotransitives, because fuck it, you've done everything else you could think of to hide that verb, don't let them find Waldo now.

I think if you really tried to map out Southern American English verb charts, you would go insane. I know, because I have, and I did.

[bradrn]

We had a long, long discussion about this topic a few years back: http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=631. Here be hornets, indeed.

Personally, I’ve retracted somewhat from the views I outlined there. After further reading, I now do indeed believe that some languages are more complex than others. We can make a fairly straightforward case that, say, creating an acceptable sentence in German is more difficult than doing so in English. That being said, English and other isolating languages aren’t nearly as simple as people like McWhorter think; there is such a thing as syntactic complexity… though on the other hand, one can pretty easily make a comprehensible English sentence even if the syntax is utterly mangled, whereas a Navajo or Ojibwe sentence with wrong morphology would be pretty hard to understand. It is difficult to know exactly how much to weight the various factors involved in making a language complex.

There’s also the matter of the lexicon: a lot of the things Moose-tache mentions are basically additional uses of individual words. Should the polysemy of the lexicon be included in an assessment of linguistic complexity? Probably not… but then again, this is perhaps the single most difficult area for second-language learners to master, if they want to sound truly native. I’m suspicious of the assertion that the grammar and the lexicon even exist as separate entities, anyhow. I’m hopeful that things like Construction Grammar and Relational Morphology could resolve these difficulties.

[Raphael]

The trouble with that question is that there isn't really a good objective measure of grammatical complexity.

This. How many complexons is the complexity of English? Or German? Or Spanish?

[bradrn]

The trouble with that question is that there isn't really a good objective measure of grammatical complexity.

This. How many complexons is the complexity of English? Or German? Or Spanish?

I had a go at defining this once, but never got very far. I still suspect this is possible, if you’re clever enough and can figure out a good enough formal theory of language.

[Raphael]

This. How many complexons is the complexity of English? Or German? Or Spanish?

I had a go at defining this once, but never got very far. I still suspect this is possible, if you’re clever enough and can figure out a good enough formal theory of language.

Hmmm. Interesting proposal.

[hwhatting]

One thing to keep in mind - people have been contrasting morphological complexity against syntactic complexity, word usage, plysemy etc., but it's not like morphologically complex languages don't have these features as well. In, e.g., Russian, word order may be less important for establishing syntatctic roles than in Engish, because the case system does part of the job, but that still doesn't mean that there aren't rules for Russian word order, or about gaps or movement, or which verb forms are adequate in which register, or which auxiliary verbs and constructions to use when, etc. If the idea is that languages not having complex morphology doesn't mean that they're easy-peasy, just string along some uninflected words, then I'm okay with that; but my experience is that complex morphology normally adds a layer without significantly reducing other areas of complexity.

[Travis B.]

I am personally of the view that while English may be morphologically simpler than, say, Spanish, it has plenty of syntactic complexity, enough to more than make up for that. At the same time, I do not assert that all languages are necessarily equally complex - of course, as mentioned, simply objectively measuring language complexity is much easier said than done.

[Richard W]

What languages are less complex than they could be? Complexity has to be bounded by the ability to learnt. Or is this concept invalidated by the difference between the free and paid for versions of English?

[Travis B.]

Or is this concept invalidated by the difference between the free and paid for versions of English?

All I got out of paying for English was learning how to "properly" use whom and there-<adposition> (and I really got them by studying German and not my English coursework); even here-<adposition> (outside fixed forms), where-<adposition>, hence (in its original sense), thence, whence, hither, thither, and whither didn't come with the version I paid for, which just shows how dead they are.

The free version of English, despite lacking these forms (outside fixed expressions), is very much quite complex enough as it is. Paying for English only gives you overly formal and archaic forms few actually use in Real Life outside of writing.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

You can also access the paid forms for free through reading literature in the public domain and researching any form you don't recognise.

[jal]

one can pretty easily make a comprehensible English sentence even if the syntax is utterly mangled

True, English is a good language to speak badly, as they say, but dealing on a daily basis with non-native English speakers of all parts of the world on various fora, I can say that mangled syntax, and the wrong choice of related words, can make even topic-constrained questions a real challenge to understand.


JAL

[Raphael]

Even stereotypical "bad English" - "Me no speak English good" - seems to have some pretty clear syntactical rules, and if someone violates both the syntactical rules of "regular English" and the syntactical rules of "stereotypically bad English", they can easily become completely incomprehensible.

[Linguoboy]

do you guys consider English grammar simpler just for lack of gender etc.

English doesn't lack gender; if anything, the rules of gender assignment are more complex because they're freer. In Spanish, perro is masculine and takes masculine agreement; if you happen to know for a fact that a particular dog is female, you'll use perra which is feminine and takes feminine agreement. In English, "dog" can take masculine, feminine, or neuter agreement. In general, this will be determined by what the sex of the dog is and whether the speakers knows it, but not always; I've often witnessed people referring to dogs of unknown sex with masculine pronouns and doing the opposite for cats. (My tomcat is misgendered regularly; even after I've repeatedly referred to him with masculine pronouns, some people will still say "she" because for them cats are apparently default feminine. Or maybe he just strikes them as particularly feminine?)

It's funny, because categories with explicit marking in the form of inflectional affixes are generally easier to learn than categories without. But people often seem to be of the opinion that languages with a lot of explicit marking are harder to learn. I was an adult before I fully appreciated the difficulty learning to distinguish count nouns and mass nouns poses for L2-speakers of English. Until recently, I don't think I appreciated that few nouns seem to belong entirely to one category or the other and the usage of particular lexemes can be finicky indeed.

[Travis B.]

one can pretty easily make a comprehensible English sentence even if the syntax is utterly mangled

True, English is a good language to speak badly, as they say, but dealing on a daily basis with non-native English speakers of all parts of the world on various fora, I can say that mangled syntax, and the wrong choice of related words, can make even topic-constrained questions a real challenge to understand.

I find pronunciation to be more of an issue than syntax or word choice. Even with non-native speakers with relatively limited English I can usually discern what they mean if their pronunciation is okay enough, but non-native speakers who have poor English pronunciation, even if they are very much educated and literate in English, can be difficult to understand.

[Raphael]

I was an adult before I fully appreciated the difficulty learning to distinguish count nouns and mass nouns poses for L2-speakers of English.

Or, if their first language is German, the entire concept of adverbs as something distinct from adjectives. And don't get me started on the different past tenses.

[Moose-tache]

creating an acceptable sentence in X is more difficult than doing so in Y.

I think this is a point that we should not leave unexamined. Grammar is not just about what sequences are incorrect. In English, there are countless strings of words that would make a correct sentence, just not the one you're trying to convey. In the sentence "Children, have you run races" any of the words could be removed and leave behind a correct sentence, at least in some dialect. This makes it trivially easy to make a sentence in English that will mean something, whereas in German or Spanish the lack of concord will quickly render any randomly generated sentence meaningless. But if anything this is a sign of greater complexity, not lesser.

As for the rat's nest of modals not counting as grammar because they are "lexicon," I ask you if an L2 learner of English would understand the syntax of the word "can" simply by being told it's the English version of poder. The whole point is that there is a lot of grammar going on with the piddly function words of English.

[zompist]

I made the mistake of arguing with some Spanish-speaking guys on Quora about complexity of grammar. They both asserted that English grammar is "basic af" and much simpler than Spanish, and also Chinese grammar is "one of the simplest in the world", like English.

It's so cute when Spanish speakers try to claim that Spanish is difficult. It makes me want to tell them that American 8th graders take Spanish because they think it's the easiest foreign language to learn. (Which given the usual alternatives, it is.)

Non-linguists talking about "grammar" usually mean only the stumbling blocks you get in the first 3 months of language learning: different writing systems; those horrible tables of morphology; basic stuff like gender. But it doesn't take 3 months to learn a language (in school)-- more like 3 years. And most of what you're learning is constructions and lexicon.