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Fischer, Klaus (2018) Grammatische Komplexität und semantische Transparenz in deutschen und englischen Satzstrukturen. In: Wortschatz: Theorie, Empirie, Dokumentation. Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft um 2020 (2). de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston. ISBN 978-3-11-053671-3
The chapter investigates the semantic transparency of German and English linguistic structures, taking the current discussion of grammatical complexity and known characterisations of both languages as a background. The discussion considers case, syntactic and pragmatic word order, verb prefixes, reflexive pronouns, gender, non-finite clauses and cleft sentences. It is shown that system complexity does not translate one-to-one to text complexity, that grammatical complexity does not necessarily result in semantic transparency and that a number of English structures are semantically more transparent than their German counterparts. The findings are illustrated with examples from a parallel text. A small quantitative study shows that the larger number of German inflectional morphemes in text is not compensated by a larger number of English function words. Nevertheless, the findings in total suggest a smaller complexity difference between the two languages than generally assumed.
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