Resumen de (Non-)compositionality and complexity: a crosslinguistic investigation
In this paper, we conduct a crosslinguistic investigation of three marked patterns formed by two most frequently used verbs on the Swadesh-100 list, whose configuration apparently does not follow the principle of compositionality, namely, Type I (Agent NP1 + eat/drink + Non-patient NP2), Type II (Non-agent NP1 + eat/drink + Patient NP2) and Type III (Non-agent NP1 + eat/drink + Non-patient NP2). It is found that if a language has the noncompositional expressions wherein NP1 is non-agent, it always has the noncompositional expressions wherein NP2 is non-patient. It is then claimed that (i) crosslinguistic variation can be accounted for by the relationship between compositionality and morphology, in the sense that languages with poor morphology tend to produce (many) more noncompositional expressions than those with rich morphology; (ii) crosslinguistic variation reveals a typological dichotomy, viz., hidden complexity versus overt complexity.
