Grammatische Komplexität und semantische Transparenz in deutschen und englischen Satzstrukturen
- Submitting institution
-
London Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 25 - Area Studies
- Output identifier
- 11.25
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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-
- Book title
- Wortschatz: Theorie, Empirie, Dokumentation
- Publisher
- De Gruyter
- ISBN
- 9783110538588
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- -
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- Yes
- English abstract
- Taking contemporary discussions of grammatical complexity as the point of departure, the article investigates the semantic transparency of sentence structures of the two languages. Their analyses show that (a) linguistic system complexity does not map one-to-one onto text complexity; (b) grammatical complexity does not necessarily equate to semantic transparency; (c) a number of English structures are semantically more transparent than their German counterparts; (d) the greater number of German inflectional morphemes is not compensated by a greater number of English function words. Overall, the quantified outcomes support a smaller complexity gap between the two languages than generally assumed.
