Abstract Recent work has cast doubt on the idea that all languages are equally complex; however, the notion of syntactic complexity remains underexplored. Taking complexity to equate to difficulty of acquisition for late L2 acquirers, we propose an operationalization of syntactic complexity in terms of uninterpretable features. Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology predicts that sociohistorical situations involving substantial late L2 acquisition should be conducive to simplification, i.e. loss of such features. We sketch a programme for investigating this prediction. In particular, we suggest that the loss of bipartite negation in the history of Low German and other languages indicates that it may be on the right track.

中文翻译：

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L2难度下的复杂性：对句法变化的启示

摘要最近的工作使人们怀疑所有语言都同样复杂。但是，句法复杂性的概念仍未得到很好的研究。考虑到复杂性等于后期L2收购者的收购难度，我们提出了根据无法解释的特征来进行语法复杂性的操作。特鲁吉尔（Trudgill）的社会语言类型学预测，涉及大量后期L2采集的社会历史情况应有助于简化，即丧失此类特征。我们草绘了一个研究此预测的程序。特别是，我们建议，在低德语和其他语言的历史中，二元否定的丧失表明这可能是正确的。