This book studies linguistic complexity and the processes by which it arises and is maintained, focusing not so much on what one can say in a language as how it is said. Complexity is not seen as synonymous with “difficulty” but as an objective property of a system – a measure of the amount of information needed to describe or reconstruct it. Grammatical complexity is the result of historical processes often subsumed under the rubric of grammaticalization and involves what can be called mature linguistic phenomena, that is, features that take time to develop. The nature and characteristics of such processes are discussed in detail, as well as the external and internal factors that favor or disfavor stability and change in language.
“I am sure the book is worth reading for any linguist, and especially for those interested in morphology, grammaticalization, and complexity. It is engaging, very thought provoking, and well written. In a sense, this book is a challenge to linguistics, or rather multiple different challenges, and I believe the field will benefit from taking up at least some of them.”
Elena Maslova,Stanford University and University Bielefeld, in Linguistic Typology 11(2), 2007
“This book is worth reading now that the research for linguistic complexity has increased substantially since the turn of the millennium...If further developed, Dahl's methodology may be ground-breaking for the research of complexity in language diachrony. On the whole the merits a high recommendation to scholars working on historical linguistics and especially to anyone interested in the study of linguistic complexity.”
2025. Geospatial effects on phonological complexity in the world’s languages. Linguistic Typology 29:3 ► pp. 627 ff.
Liu, Siqi, Jianwei Yan & Haitao Liu
2025. The complexity trade-off between morphological richness and word order freedom in Romance languages: A quantitative perspective. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 141:2 ► pp. 323 ff.
2025. Implizit trotz maximaler Explizitheit: Beobachtungen und Überlegungen zum Funktions- und Wirkungspotential von Implikaturen am Beispiel von Swisstransplant. Lebende Sprachen 70:2 ► pp. 607 ff.
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2025. Orality and overtness: effects on Spanish subject use. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 11:2 ► pp. 363 ff.
Merino Hernández, Laura M. & Matti Marttinen Larsson
2025. How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish. Linguistics Vanguard
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2025. Is Word Order Responsive to Morphology? Disentangling Cause and Effect in Morphosyntactic Change in Five Western European Languages. Entropy 27:1 ► pp. 53 ff.
2025. Lexical bloom, syntactic retreat: examining complexity trade-offs within Classical Chinese evolution across two millennia. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory
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2025. Multifunctionality matters: preverbal yǒu in Mandarin and its aspectual potential. Folia Linguistica 59:3 ► pp. 469 ff.
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2025. Managing Variations in Meaning: Guidance for Using “Complexity” and Related Terms. Systems Engineering
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2025. Compounding words in the syntax can produce phrasal phonology: Evidence from Japanese Aoyagi morphemes. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 43:4 ► pp. 3069 ff.
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Симметрическая и ретроспективная темпоральная подвижность в андийских языках
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2024. Relative complexity in a model of word difficulty: The role of loanwords in vocabulary size tests. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching 14:4 ► pp. 631 ff.
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2024. Patterns of linguistic simplification on social media platforms over time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121:50
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2024. Structural complexity reduction in English–French bilingual children’s event encoding. Journal of Child Language 51:6 ► pp. 1243 ff.
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2024. Illuminating the Impacts of Contextual Diversity on L2 Writing Proficiency: A Corpus-Based Analysis in the Measures of Linguistic Complexity. European Journal of Applied Linguistics 12:2 ► pp. 437 ff.
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2024. Measuring linguistic complexity in Chinese: An information-theoretic approach. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:1
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2024. A Descriptive and Experimental Investigation of Recursive Compounds in English: Their Semantic, Syntactic, and Phonological Characterization. Languages 9:5 ► pp. 175 ff.
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2024. From Esperanto to Volapük: Interpretable Graph Features for Assessing Linguistic Complexity in Constructed Languages. IEEE Access 12 ► pp. 127637 ff.
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2023. The Missing Dative Alternation in Romance: Explaining Stability and Change in the Argument Structure of Latin Ditransitives. Transactions of the Philological Society 121:1 ► pp. 33 ff.
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2023. Gender variation across the Oromo dialects: A corpus‐based study*. Studia Linguistica 77:3 ► pp. 453 ff.
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2023. The Structural Complexity of Chinese Words and Its Relationship with Word Frequency. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 30:3-4 ► pp. 231 ff.
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2023. Precursors of Sociolinguistic Typology. European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 53:1 ► pp. 99 ff.
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2023. The complexity principle and the morphosyntactic alternation between case affixes and postpositions in Estonian. Cognitive Linguistics 34:2 ► pp. 297 ff.
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2023. Non-canonical word order as a measure of syntactic complexity in advanced L2 German. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 61:3 ► pp. 877 ff.
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2023. Evolutionary pathways of complexity in gender systems. Journal of Language Evolution 8:2 ► pp. 120 ff.
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2023. A quantitative global test of the complexity trade-off hypothesis: the case of nominal and verbal grammatical marking. Linguistics Vanguard 9:s1 ► pp. 155 ff.
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2023. What do complexity measures measure? Correlating and validating corpus-based measures of morphological complexity. Linguistics Vanguard 9:s1 ► pp. 27 ff.
2022. Exponence and the functional load of grammatical tone in Gyeli. Phonology 39:3 ► pp. 473 ff.
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2022. The interaction effect between source text complexity and machine translation quality on the task difficulty of NMT post-editing from English to Chinese: A multi-method study. Across Languages and Cultures 23:1 ► pp. 36 ff.
2022. Attributive modification in South American indigenous languages. Linguistics 60:3 ► pp. 745 ff.
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2022. ¿Existiría la gramática si no hubiera gramaticalización?. Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 11:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
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2022. Noun phrase complexity and contiguity in a Papuan language. Linguistics 60:3 ► pp. 829 ff.
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2022. The role of frequency in the acquisition of structured variation: The case of Basque ergativity. International Journal of Bilingualism 26:5 ► pp. 656 ff.
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2021. Tense–aspect–mood marking, language-family size and the evolution of predication. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376:1824
2020. Investigating Syntactic Complexity in EFL Learners' Writing across Common European Framework of Reference Levels A1, A2, and B1. Applied Linguistics 41:4 ► pp. 506 ff.
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2019. On case loss and svarabhakti vowels: the sociolinguistic typology and geolinguistics of simplification in North Germanic. Journal of Linguistic Geography 7:01 ► pp. 1 ff.
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2019. Acquiring diminutive allomorphs: taking item-specific characteristics into account. Journal of Child Language 46:3 ► pp. 567 ff.
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2018. Why Don't Languages Adapt to Their Environment?. Frontiers in Communication 3
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2018. Whence subject-verb agreement? Investigating the role of topicality, accessibility, and frequency in Vera’a texts. Linguistics 56:4 ► pp. 735 ff.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 7 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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