Language complexity: An insight from complex-system theory

This paper aims to establish a more direct relation between the studies of complexity in the field of typological-evolutionary linguistics and complex-system theory. The article explains what complex-system theory can tell us about language complexity and how insights from the science of complex systems can be important to the analysis of linguistic complexity. By founding his argumentation on the principles of complex-system theory, the author maintains that linguistic complexity cannot be equaled to cardinality. Although a comparison of complexities can be effectuated only in numerical or set-theoretical terms, the cardinality of a series or a set is neither unique nor the most important property of a complex system. Equally or even more relevant features are openness, situatedness, lack of boundaries, individual instability, uncertainty, non-linearity, exponential sensitivity to initial conditions, dynamicity, metastability, path dependency, emergence, regional chaos, non-additivity, non-modularization, irreducibility, organizational intricacy, and models’ incompressibility, incompleteness, provisionality or plurality. The author argues that, following complex-system theory, once a distinction between the complexity of language as a real-world phenomenon and the complexity of its model is made, any numerical comparison of the overall or local complexity of languages becomes either futile or deeply theory conditioned. In realistic complex systems, complexity is always infinite, while in models – where, by means of fictionalized approximations adopted by an observer or explainer, it can be made finite – complexity entirely depends on a scientific frame of reference and approach with which it has been quantified. Accordingly, any quantification of the complexity of natural languages is either identical, as it is infinite (in realistic languages), or relative (in scientific models). In this manner, no measurement may claim to establish the ultimate hierarchy of less or more complex languages.