Katharina Ehret Freiburg

A corpus based study of information theoretic complexity in World Englishes

Recent research in the field of linguistic complexity has primarily focused on the correlation of complexity with language external factors (e.g. Miestamo et al. [ed.] 2008; Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi [ed.] to appear). Yet, those studies mainly rely on subjective or empirically expensive means of measuring complexity. In the spirit of Juola (2008) I will present an objective and economical method to approach linguistic complexity. More precisely, I propose to investigate variance of linguistic complexity in geographical varieties of English drawing on data from ICE (International Corpus of English) and using quantitative, information theoretically based methodologies. Thus, I will contribute to solve the issue of finding a more generally applicable complexity metric and provide an economical means of measurement. In interpreting complexity variance Trudgill?s (2009) typological distinction between high- and low contact varieties and Schneider?s (2003, 2007) ?Dynamic Model? will be adopted.

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