\title{Measuring Linguistic Complexity : The Morphological Tier}

\author{Patrick Juola \\
Department of Experimental Psychology \\
Oxford University \\
Oxford, UK  OX1 3UD\\
Tel : +44 1865 271 404 \\
{\tt patrick.juola@psy.ox.ac.uk }
}


\begin{abstract}
\begin{quote}
{\em How to measure morphological complexity is itself an issue of some
complexity.}  \cite{nichols:diversity}
\end{quote}

This work develops an information-theoretic and functionally motivated
method of measuring ``linguistic complexity'' from corpora that can
in theory be applied to any definable substructure.  This method
is further extended
into a way of objectively and numerically measuring
the morphological complexity of a given language sample, avoiding the
typical difficulties of focusing on only a few unrepresentative
types of constructions.  
By selectively altering the morphological information
present in a sample, the complexity can be measured as the change in
overall informativeness of a text.  This claim has been 
tested in a small-scale cross-linguistic experiment; the results agree
well with both intuitions and existing measurements.
\end{abstract}