Some thoughts on the complexity of syntactic complexity
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Walkden & Breitbarth (henceforth: W&B) outline an innovative research programme which, among other things, aims to probe the notion of syntactic complexity by approaching it from a sociolinguistically informed second-language (L2) perspective. Given the valuable insights, synchronic and diachronic, that have been emerging from sociolinguistically sensitive generative work, there can be little dispute about the feasibility and value of going beyond the classic idealized generative paradigm in advancing our understanding of language variation and change in general. The purpose of this short commentary is to consider three aspects of W&B’s proposed sociolinguistically informed interpretation of (syntactic) complexity in terms of L2 difficulty: sections 2 and 3 are concerned with conceptual matters, while section 4 focuses on technicalities associated with the proposed operationalization of ‘syntactic complexity’ in terms of uninterpretable features.
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1613-4060