Language Complexity Trade-Offs: New Empirical Evidence
GermÃ¡n Coloma
International Journal of Computational Linguistics Research, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2024.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6025/jcl/2024/15/1/18-33
Link: https://www.dline.info/jcl/fulltext/v15n1/jclv15n1_3.pdf
Abstract:
In this paper we provide empirical evidence to evaluate the results that originally appeared in Coloma (2015) and Coloma (2017), using a newly-assembled database of 50 languages for which we have the same text (which is the fable known as â€œThe North Wind and the Sunâ€). Most conclusions of the original papers remain the same, especially the ones that signal the existence of language complexity tradeoffs. This is particularly clear when we look at partial correlation coefficients between three linguistic ratios (phonemes per syllable, syllables per word, and words per clause), when we use simultaneous-equation regression methods, and when we estimate different versions of the Menzerath law, that relate phonemes per word and words per clause.