Development Trends in the Morphological-Typological Profile of German

Authors:

Pages: 37-49
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/YDDN9508

Abstract:

The article presents the results of an analysis of samples extracted from a total of six corpora containing literary, scientific and journalistic texts stemming from fixed periods within the 20th and 21st centuries. The aim is to discover whether and to what extent the morphology of the German language has become more or less analytic or synthetic and what quantitative morphological-typological differences there are between the three major text types: literary, scientific, and journalistic. The concept of grammaticity is also briefly discussed and applied to the analysis. The study finds, among other things, that 21st-century scientific texts tend to exhibit a higher level of syntheticity than the other two text types, that German has simultaneously become less analytic and less synthetic over the past 100 years, and that, as a result, it encodes less grammatical information nowadays than it did at the outset of the 1920s.

Keywords:

typological profiling; analyticity index; syntheticity index; grammaticity; German; corpus samples.

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