Sociocultural determination of linguistic complexity
Mark Atkinson (Stirling)
Wednesday 6 July 2016, 16:00–16:30
Seminar Room 6, Chrystal McMillan Building
Languages evolve, adapting to pressures arising from their learning and use. As these pressures may be different in different sociocultural environments, non-linguistic factors relating to the group structure of the people who speak a language may influence features of the language itself.
My thesis focuses on two key hypotheses which connect group structure to complex language features and evaluates them through a series of experiments. Firstly, I consider the claim that languages spoken by greater numbers of people are morphologically less complex than those employed by smaller groups, and assess two candidate mechanisms by which population size could have such an effect. Secondly, I assess a claim that esoteric communication — that carried out by smaller groups in which large amounts of information is shared and in which adult learning is absent — leads to the generation and maintenance of more complex language features.
In this talk, I will summarise the main findings of my thesis, and briefly introduce some of the experiments to support those findings. I conclude that adult language learning is the most plausible explanation for how morphological complexity is determined by population size, but that native speaker accommodation to adult learners may be a crucial linking mechanism, and that more esoteric communicative contexts leads to the development of more opaque lexical items.