Umfassende Bestandsaufnahme, Beschreibung und Erklärung wesentlicher Kontraste zwischen den Strukturen des Englischen und des Deutschen

The goal of our project is to provide a comprehensive and detailed description of major contrasts between English and German in both the grammar and the lexicon. Building on a monograph that was primarily intended as a text book for university education (König & Gast 2007, "Understanding English-German Contrasts"), individual phenomena and problems that have not yet been fully understood will undergo further examination. Specifically, the project is concerned with the following subject areas: (i) complementation (with emphasis on sentential complements), (ii) information structure and stress )e.g. verum focus) and (iii) the structure and interpretation of the noun phrase (with a focus on determination and compounding).In contrast to the programme of Contrastive Linguistics formulated in the 1960s and 1970s, which was primarily aimed at improving foreign language teaching, our project is not intended as a contribution to applied linguistics. It focuses on the description of interesting contrasts between English and German as well as possible explanations for these contrasts.

DFG Programme Research Grants

Ehemaliger Antragsteller Professor Dr. Ekkehard König, until 5/2009