German Uses More Complex Adjectives Than English, Study Finds
Researchers analyzing millions of words across English and German texts discovered that German speakers deploy extended adjectives—those modified by adverbs or other elements—roughly twice as often. The finding has implications for machine translation, language instruction, and understanding how different languages encode information density differently.
Originaltitel: Extended attributesin English and German fiction andnon-fiction
Abstract This study concerns extended attributes, i.e. adjectival or participial premodifiers taking at least one extension such as an adverbial ( a very impressive lie; der 1886 geborene Berufssoldat ). The comparisons involve English and German fiction from the Oslo Multilingual Corpus and non-fiction from the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus. It is found that such attributes are more frequent in German than in English and in non-fiction than in fiction. In both languages, the most frequent function of the extensions is to express degree, and adverbs are the most common extensions. Nevertheless, German shows more variation regarding both the form and function of the extensions. Apart from token frequencies, there are only small cross-genre differences.