Doctoral students are routinely told by their supervisors that they should delimit their topic,
realize that they need not state their opinion on every important issue in linguistics and that …

1 Background This book responds to the fact that an idea which ranked for many decades as
an unquestioned truism of linguistics is now coming under attack from many different …

The long-received truism that all languages are ultimately about equal in complexity has
taken some serious criticism in recent years. McWhorter (2001a) shows that one set of …

The dominant theories of SLA: input-output in the '70s, interaction in the '80s, interculturality
in the '90s, and their linear assumptions regarding language acquisition and use have …

In this paper, I address theoretical and methodological issues in the cross-linguistic study of
grammatical complexity. I identify two different approaches to complexity: the absolute one …

Human languages are of much greater complexity than the communicative systems of great
apes, dolphins, bees, and other animals. 1 Similarly, human culture, technology, and …

This book examines the question of whether languages can differ in grammatical complexity
and, if so, how relative complexity differences might be measured. The volume differs from …

In the past decades, there has been a surge in interest in the study of language complexity
in second language (L2) research. In this article we provide an overview of current …

In this article, we introduce a template of methodological considerations, termed “the
dynamic ensemble,” for scholars doing or evaluating empirical second language …

In this plenary address, I suggest that Complexity Theory has the potential to contribute a
transdisciplinary theme to applied linguistics. Transdisciplinary themes supersede …