Grammatische Komplexität und semantische Transparenz in deutschen und englischen Satzstrukturen

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

Preview

Text 04_Beitrag_Fischer_LexikbandKORR.pdf - Accepted Version Download (505kB) | Preview

Abstract / Description

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.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	German and English linguistic structures, grammatical complexity, system complexity, text complexity, semantic transparency, Hawkins' claims, case, syntactic and pragmatic word order, verb prefixes, reflexive pronouns, gender, non-finite clauses, cleft sentences, grammaticity, syntheticity, analyticity, contrastive study of inflectional morphemes and function words in text
Subjects:	400 Language > 410 Linguistics 400 Language > 420 English & Old English 400 Language > 430 Germanic languages; German
Department:	Guildhall School of Business and Law
Depositing User:	Klaus Fischer
Date Deposited:	23 Apr 2019 08:45
Last Modified:	01 Aug 2019 01:58
URI:	https://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/id/eprint/4764

Available Versions of this Item

• Grammatische Komplexität und semantische Transparenz in deutschen und englischen Satzstrukturen. (deposited 23 Apr 2019 08:45) [Currently Displayed]

Downloads

Actions (login required)

View Item