Monday, May 25, 2009

complexity in isolating languages: lexical elaboration versus grammatical economy

elizabeth m. riddle

"I argue that although isolating Asian languages such as Hmong, Mandarin Chinese, and Thai may be economical in terms of inflection, they exhibit significantly more complex lexical patterns of particular types than more synthetic lanaguges such as Polish and English in like contexts."

non-inflecting languages have lots of complexity in other ways.

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