Der Genitiv in der „Leichten Sprache“ – das Für und Wider aus theoretischer und empirischer Sicht

Abstract Rulebooks of Easy-to-read (ETR) German recommend to strictly avoid the genitive and to replace it by “von”-phrases with dative. This is backed by the assumption that for the target groups of ETR German genitive-phrases are generally harder to understand than “von”-phrases. However, there has been no empirical foundation for this assumption. The test reported in this paper addressed this problem and wanted to find out whether genitive is really harder to understand than “von”-phrases for two target groups: 17 adults with intellectual disability and 16 functional illiterates, that is people, who learned to read but, due to multiple reasons, do not have reading skills (anymore) that are sufficient for everyday life. The test was designed as multiple-choice test and compares the intelligibility of common forms of the attributive genitive (i.a. genitivus obiectivus, genitivus partitivus) with their “von”-paraphrases. The participants had to read and understand sentences and subsequently choose between statements that applied to the sentences or not. The overall results show that the tested forms of the attributive genitive were easy to understand. Comparing genitive-phrases and “von”-phrases there were no significant differences. That means, both forms were easy to understand for the participants. Some genitive forms were even easier to understand than the “von”-paraphrases. The results lead to the conclusion that the general prohibition of genitive in ETR German has to be revised.