Phonotactic Complexity across Dialects
Ryan Soh-Eun Shim Kalvin Chang David R. Mortensen
Received wisdom in linguistic typology holds that if the structure of a
language becomes more complex in one dimension, it will simplify in another,
building on the assumption that all languages are equally complex (Joseph and
Newmeyer, 2012). We study this claim on a micro-level, using a
tightly-controlled sample of Dutch dialects (across 366 collection sites) and
Min dialects (across 60 sites), which enables a more fair comparison across
varieties. Even at the dialect level, we find empirical evidence for a tradeoff
between word length and a computational measure of phonotactic complexity from
a LSTM-based phone-level language model-a result previously documented only at
the language level. A generalized additive model (GAM) shows that dialects with
low phonotactic complexity concentrate around the capital regions, which we
hypothesize to correspond to prior hypotheses that language varieties of
greater or more diverse populations show reduced phonotactic complexity. We
also experiment with incorporating the auxiliary task of predicting syllable
constituency, but do not find an increase in the negative correlation observed.