This book presents a challenge to the widely-held assumption
that human languages are both similar and constant in their
degree of complexity. For a hundred years or more the universal
equality of languages has been a tenet of faith among most
anthropologists and linguists. It has been frequently advanced
as a corrective to the idea that some languages are at a later
stage of evolution than others. It also appears to be an
inevitable outcome of one of the central axioms of generative
linguistic theory: that the mental architecture of language is
fixed and is thus identical in all languages and that whereas
genes evolve languages do not. "Language Complexity as an
Evolving Variable" reopens the debate. Geoffrey Sampson's
introductory chapter re-examines and clarifies the notion and
theoretical importance of complexity in language, linguistics,
cognitive science, and evolution. Eighteen distinguished
scholars from all over the world then look at evidence gleaned
from their own research in order to reconsider wh