Reihenfolge statt Komplexifizierung als Erklärung für morphologische Komplexität

Morphological complexity is mostly due to element order rather than to complexification                                                        

In this provocative talk, I point out that the prevailing view on “morphological complexity” has ignored the crucial role of element order and has thus gone seriously astray. While earlier work such as Greenberg (1960) confined itself to observing differences in “morphological complexity”, work of the last two decades has tended to make claims about exteral causal factors. In particular, McWhorter (2003; 2011; 2016), Lupyan & Dale (2010) and Trudgill (2011) have argued that particular sociolinguistic situations favour the development of “morphologically simple” languages, while others tend to lead to “complexification”.

     The causal mechanism of simplification through adult second langage acquisition seems plausible at first, but this literature almost never asks whether it is specifically “morphology” that is hard for adult learners to acquire or whether grammatical markers more generally present difficulties. So what exactly is “morphology”, and “morphological complexity”?

     Most straightforwardly, morphology is the structure of words, and a morphologically complex word is one that has many constituent elements or requires many rules to be generated. But how are word boundaries drawn? There seems to be fairly widespread agreement in practice that affixes exhibit host-class specificity (non-promiscuity; Zwicky & Pullum 1983; Haspelmath 2021), so that, e.g., the English definite article the is not a prefix (as it can occur not only before nouns, but also adjectives: the+cup, the+new cup), while the Swedish definite article -en is a suffix (as it occurs only after nouns: kopp+en ‘the cup’, den nya kopp+en ‘the new cup’, kopp+en där borta ‘the cup over there’). If this is adopted as the key criterion, then it is clear that the affix status of a grammatical marker is co-determined by element order in a wide range of contexts. For the following pairs of possibilities (where the grammatical marker is boldfaced), the next page contains a range of exemplifying languages.

            affix                                                              non-affix

(A)      flag + noun (+ adjective)                               flag (+ adjective) + noun

(B)       (adjective +) noun + flag                               noun (+ adjective) + flag

(C)       (adjective +) noun + plural                           noun (+ adjective) + plural

(D)      aspect + verb (+ adverb)                               aspect (+ adverb) + verb

(E)       (object +) verb + relativizer                          verb (+ object) + relativizer

(F)       subject + verb + complementizer                  complementizer + subject + verb     

Flags and number markers can be affixes only if adjectives do not intervene, aspect markers can be affixes if adverbs do not intervene, and so on. Thus, affixhood is dependent on element order.

     One might try to adopt other tests for distinguishing affixes from non-affixes, or hope to rely on test batteries, and I will address a few such alternatives in the talk. But none of them have been successful, and it is only for root changes that we have (near-)consensus about their morphological status. Thus, unless one wants to drastically restrict “morphological complexity” to root-change (or endophonic) patterns, element order remains a crucial ingredient. The claims of sociolinguistic typology (which no doubt have some prima facie plausibility) thus need to be approached in a more rigorous fashion in the future.

     Finally, I point out that sometimes “morphology” seems to be equated with grammatical marking, which would of course change the claims drastically. There could then be no claim of any relation between sociotypes and word structure types, e.g. no relation between sociotypes and “polysynthesis” (e.g. Fortescue et al. 2017).