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Fischer, Klaus (2007) Komplexität und semantische Transparenz im Deutschen und Englischen. Sprachwissenschaft, 32 (4). pp. 355-401. ISSN 0344-8169
Taking D. L. Everett's controversial analysis of Pirahã as the point of departure, this article revisits J. A. Hawkins's contrastive typology of German and English that - like D. L. Everett's analysis - attempts explanation from one unifying principle. The article analyses a translation corpus and, based on the respective findings, argues that J. A. Hawkins's typology is in need of complementation: both simple and complex German sentences turn out to be less semantically transparent than their English counterparts in a number of respects. The article also addresses the generally accepted complexity differential between the two languages: this decreases if grammatical complexity is not reduced to morphological complexity and if both realisation and text frequency of grammatical categories are considered in the spirit of a typology of parole.
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