Kausalitätsrelationen am deutsch-italienischen Sprachvergleich: Standardsprache vs Leichte Sprache

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of the grammatical encoding of causal relations (KR) in German and Italian. The research is conducted on two levels: first, a comparison of the two language systems, which share a comparable inventory of grammatical items for encoding KR, and second, an analysis of specific language varieties. The focus is on texts in standard language (StS) and their translations into Leichte Sprache (LS) and easy-to-read Italian. LS, a simplified linguistic variety optimized for enhancing comprehension, involves a series of grammatical and semantic simplifications that affect the encoding of KR. This paper examines the differences in KR encoding between StS and LS, exploring how syntactic and semantic structures are adapted to ensure text comprehensibility and accessibility. An exploratory analysis of the inventory of causal connectors in both languages is presented, with a focus on the reduction of complex semantic relationships in LS.