Linguistic complexity between what can be heard/seen and what cannot

– overt vs. hidden complexity

Lecture with Professor Walter Bisang, Johannes Gutenberg University.

Abstract

Linguistic discussions on complexity come in various shades. Some models are based on cognitive costs and difficulty of acquisition, others look at how grammatical distinctions are expressed, yet another group of linguists focus on recursion and merge and, finally, complexity can be measured in terms of algorithmic information theory.

What is common to all of the above approaches is their concentration on linguistic form. In my presentation, I argue that form is only one side of complexity. Seen from the perspective of the two competing motivations of explicitness vs. economy, explicitness is concerned with the form side and the overt formal realization of grammatical information in a language, while economy aims at leaving that information to pragmatic inference even if the relevant grammatical inventory is available. The former type of complexity will be called overt complexity, the latter economy-based type will be called hidden complexity (Bisang 2009, 2014, 2015). Hidden complexity manifests itself in the omission of contextually inferable grammatical marking and the multifunctionality of individual grammatical markers.

I will illustrate the functioning of hidden complexity in its interaction with overt complexity with examples from East and mainland Southeast Asian languages (EMSEA: Sinitic, Tai-Kadai, Mon-Khmer, Hmong-Mien). As a result, it will turn out that hidden complexity often comes with (i) a different division of labour between grammar and the lexicon (Xing 2015, Bisang 2020) and (ii) that even highly grammaticalized markers still express important discourse functions.

Biography

Studies of General Linguistics, Chinese Language and Literature, and Georgian at the University of Zurich from 1978 to 1986. PhD in General Linguistics in 1990 at the University of Zurich on Serial Verb Constructions in mainland East and Southeast Asian languages. Full professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since 1992. Visiting professor at various universities and research institutions (including Bangkok, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Ile Ife, Melbourne, Paris). Member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature (Mainz) and the Academia Europaea.

Coordinator of the Collaborative Research Centre “Cultural and Linguistic Contacts” from 1999 to 2008, funded by the German Research Foundation. Research interests: language typology, comparison of linguistic theories. Grammatical structures: complexity in language, historical/diachronic development of grammatical structures, nominal classification, parts of speech, complex predicates, clause linking.