4. Grammatische Komplexität und semantische Transparenz in deutschen und englischen Satzstrukturen

Abstract

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.