Komplexität kontrastiv: Am Beispiel der Ganzsätze im Deutschen und Dänischen

This article investigates the complexity of sentences in German and Danish. Drawing on a recursion-based approach to complexity and on a corpus study, it is demonstrated that sentences are more complex in the Danish part of the corpus than in the German one. This is, for instance, reflected in the fact that in the Danish texts, there are more clauses per sentence, more clause complexes and more subordinate clauses of a higher degree of dependency. It is argued that the tendency towards less complex sentence structures in the German part of the corpus can be considered a reflex of the processing difficulties of framing constructions.