Thank you a lot Mahmood!

My question is however not in what are they different/similar or where one can make a mistake becouse of the language specificities. I do rarely mistakes when expressing in French what I mean. (If I know what I mean, of course.)

In my question here I meant that : The French sentences are usually longer (in number of words) than the English sentences saiyng the same thing. This can be eventually evaluated even whith some simple stat on Google translate. At the same time people dealing with the two languages agree that the French grammar is more "Difficult".

My wondering is : has this general observation been expressed in terms of syntax complexity. And if it has been - how. Obviousely the best would be to find some structured study which uses measures or whatever formal criteria to evaluate the "dificulty".

I liked a lot this:

"" The German is easier than the English. ""

Thank you!

Velina

Hi Velina,

Speakers of European languages usually claim that German syntax is the hardest, but this claim stems from folk linguistic beliefs, not from linguistic evidence. The issue of difficulty begs the follow up question, 'in which area?'. I don't believe you can compare linguistic systems in toto. A language may use more complex sentences but this complexity can produce redundancy which in turn can foster rather than hinder comprehension. In addition, you need to take into account the speaker's first language. Italian or Spanish speakers may find acquiring French as a second language easier than English while the opposite could obtain for Dutch speakers. The issue of intra-language developmental sequences may be of relevance here as well.

Thank you a lot, Susana!

Yes, agreed. My question is related to data (big samples) from first language aquistition, small children. So - no influense of first language. I wont to compare somehow two linguistic systems in toto, but based on the comlexity of concepts'' formation. So I go to cognitive issues based on Barsalou's grounded cognition together with some math model and obtain classes of complexity similar to the set of primes proposed by Steven Pinker in the “semantic bootstrapping hypothesis” of language acquisition. My data shows that after 24 months old, french children start using more words (in number) per utterence (sentense) than English children, which is easely explainable by the particularuties of the languages aquired. According to the model and the stat on the corpora, there is no difference in the used ammount of cognitive ressources in the aquisition each of the languages investigated. My concrete problem is that after 24 months the number of words per sentense used by French children is bigger, but this should NOT reflect on the sentence-complexity. I am looking for WHY it should not influence it. That is all.

P.S.

Have those who claim that German syntax is the hardest compared it with, e.g. Polish or Estonian syntax? Or you did not mean Indo-Eropean languages or the languages spoken in Europe, but a part of them? It seems to me that the case-structure of some of them (syntetic) makes them more ... difficult... at the level of sentence structure. The question stays - what is "difficulty".

French sentences seems to be longer and more difficult because French verbs are under more conjugations and in French sentences more prepresitions are used (this is my personal experience, definitely corpora data are needed to varify it). Besides, measurements are used to gauge sentence complexity, such as average sentence length, the number of T-units, etc. , you can use this to do corpus analysis.

Thank you a lot, Matthew!

The average sentence lenght was used in the corpus analysis. It shows that French cnildren use longer sentenses after 24 months of language experience then the English children. I am not convinced that the lenght of the sentence measured in number of words shows its syntactic complexity. Or am I wrong? My reasoning is: in syntetic languages are used less prepositions and the structure is shown by the case markers, which "enter within" the words. So the wordcount will show less words in an average russian sentence saying the same as the sentences in french .

But English and French have the same degree of "prepositionism" (to invent a word) and the difference is not due to this.

I wonder how should the more congugations in French influence syntactic complexity. They do influence the learners'' discomfort" when trying to use the correct conjugation, but the syntactis complexity - I don't know. How do you see this? Perhaps it is evident for linguists.

On an abstract (i. e. non-empirical, non-corpus-based, non-acquisitional) level, theoretical discourse on the relative structural complexity of languages and how, if at all, it can be measured has been around for a while (e.g. in the context of creolistics). The following Wikipedia article provides a brief overview as well andersrum es of references to dig deeper: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_complexity.

The consensus being that structural complexity does vary among languages, it heavily depends on the definition of 'complexity' (a rather complex thing itself).

I can't tell in how far all this relates to acquistional research.

Best

Neven

Thank you, Neven!

Very informative link!

Yes, ths definition of complexity is a complex thing itself.

Best

Dear Nicoletta,

Thank you very much for the answer snd the reasoning that you provide. The links are very useful, Pollock was a bit difficult for me, but I understood it. The results of the second study which you suggest are quite informative from my point of view: "only the subjects (French speaking) instructed on adverbs (in English) came to know the restrictions on adverb placement imposed by lack of verb movement in English." Very interrestning! Could that mean that the lack of verb movement in English somehow restricts "free" and "frequent" use of adverbs becouse of the word order and that in French this is not the case?

Concerning the number of words in a sentence, I agree with your reasonning that the long-distances covered by the morpho-rules allow longer sentences: "just because it is easier to disambiguate word dependencies, even at long distance"" . But the longer sentences in this case say more things, don't they? The observations are about "equal" senses. As an example, I took one of the Mahmood sentences (in the first reply to my question) in French and in English and counted the words:

> L' Anglais est plus difficile que l' Allemand.

Word Count 8

> English is harder than German.

Word Count 5

Well, both transmit identical meaning. One may wonder why French are not tired of speaking.... In Italian it would be as in French, I think. The best is in Russian - 3 words.

Thank you again, I will be glad to go on exchanging.

Velina

Dear Velina

I'm tempted to argue that the word count is not necessarily a good measure of complexity. Indeed, in the pair of sentences

(1) L'anglais est plus difficile que l'allemand

(2) English is harder than German

We have that in (1), the word count is 8 whereas in (2), the word count is 5.

However, the word "harder" in English is equivalent to "more hard", with some morphology to reflect the fact (comparative suffx "-er"), whereas, in French, there is no such morpheme. In fact, I am tempted to treat the French word "plus" as a prefix, given that nothing can interfere between plus and the following adjective when used as a comparative. Under such analysis, the word count in (1) reduces to 7.

One may argue that in (2), there is a phonetically null determiner preceiding "English" and "German", which is present in syntax, while absent in the phonology, which would then increase the word count to 7.

Alternatively, "anglais" and "allemand", used as common noun denoting languages cannot appear in any sentences without the article "le" (contracted to " l' ") (sentences like "Je parle français" have the noun "français" used adverbially). Therefore one may conclude that (for such nouns) the determiner is part of the lexicon (I conceide that this latter argument is a bit stretchy) which would yield to the same complexity (measured in terms of word count).

One can then try to measure syntactic complexity in terms of parameters (under a "principles and parameters" approach to cross linguistic variation) but such an approach is inherently biased by the fact that, historically, formal syntax within a UG framework has been based mainly on English and some other Indo-European languages, and thus, the measure of complexity in terms of parameters would be biased by inequality in terms of language analysis, by the very formulation of parameters, and by ranking these parameters (how complex is the existence of NULL determiners, compared to a systematic movement from V to T ?).

My final answer to your interrogation would then be: I don't think there currently exist an adequate basis of comparison for syntactic complexity.

(All this argumentation has to be taken with a grain of salt, however, as I am an undergratuate student doing a minor in the field of linguistics)