Syntactic complexity

Definition
Syntactic complexity can be measured in terms of the number of immediate constituents of a syntactic construction. This property has been shown to depend on the frequency of a construction type and vice versa. In the framework of synergetic linguistics, it is also connected with position (within a mother constituent) and length (measured in terms of the number of terminal nodes. This dependency models a hypothesis which is a modified version of Hawkins' Early Immediate Constituent principle.