Relative Clauses and their Equivalents in German and English: Comparing Tight and Loose Form–Meaning Mappings in Language Use

This study compares postnominal finite relative clauses and their translation equivalents in a parallel corpus of German and English. Of particular interest are cases where one language, generally English, used a syntactically and semantically reduced nominal modifier instead of the finite relative. Such contrasts in language use are linked to contrasts in their grammars whereby German has been described as having a “tighter fit” in general between forms and their corresponding semantic representations and English a “looser fit.” This same typology is now seen as operating in actual usage as well, even though both languages share the same finite structure plus numerous reduced modifiers. The data presented here illustrate how the tight-fit/loose-fit typology can be extended into quantitative predictions for testing on cross-language corpora and they support a hypothesized correspondence between grammatical variation and performance variation.*