BRaCeLeT talk series, #4

Fred Karlsson (University of Helsinki)

Recent research on language complexity

Language complexity has been the object of intensive research since the 1990s. An early multidisciplinary forerunner was the Santa Fe Institute of Complexity Science, established in 1984 and now still going strong in its fourth decade. As for work on language complexity, I shall discuss at least the following questions:

• How should the general notion of "complexity" be defined in the first place?
• What is “language complexity” as a notion relating to the language system, and how does it relate to real-time “efficiency of language processing”?
• What phonetic factors make the acoustic speech signal complex?
• Why is morphology so different from the other subsystems of language (i.e. why do some languages have very elaborate morphological systems, whereas other languages have no morphology whatsoever)?
• Why is the lexicon the most complex linguistic subsystem?
• Is Chomsky’s famous claim true, viz. that there are no essential restrictions on syntactic complexity?
• Is there a correlation between language complexity and sociocultural conditions of language communities?
• Are there long-term tendencies in the historical development of language complexity?

time

14 April 2016, Thursday 4pm

place

1088 Budapest, Múzeum körút 4, I029 (building I is to the east of building R)

Fred Karlsson is professor (1980–2012) emeritus of general linguistics at the University of Helsinki and recent chairman of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters. His fields of research range from phonology to computational and corpus linguistics, and historiography of linguistics. The list of his most cited works includes: Suomen kielen äänne- ja muotorakenne (Sound and Form Structure of the Finnish Language, 1983); Constraint grammar as a framework for parsing running text (paper, 1990); The history of linguistics in the Nordic countries (2000; coauthors: Even Hovdhaugen, Carol Henriksen, Bengt Sigurd).

In the last two decades, his main interest has been complexity in the world’s languages.

List of publications 1969–2016 (most of them downloadable): http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/publfk2.html