35.198, Review: Leichte Sprache, Einfache Sprache, verständliche Sprache: Bock and Pappert (2023)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-198. Tue Jan 16 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.198, Review: Leichte Sprache, Einfache Sprache, verständliche Sprache: Bock and Pappert (2023)

Moderators: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Daniel Swanson, Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Zackary Leech, Lynzie Coburn, Natasha Singh, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Justin Fuller <justin at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: 16-Jan-2024
From: Thomas Schwaiger [schwaigt at gmx.at]
Subject: Applied Linguistics: Bock and Pappert (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.932

AUTHOR: Bettina M. Bock
AUTHOR: Sandra Pappert
TITLE: Leichte Sprache, Einfache Sprache, verständliche Sprache
SERIES TITLE: narr STUDIENBÜCHER
PUBLISHER: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Thomas Schwaiger

SUMMARY

The German textbook (“Studienbuch”) “Leichte Sprache, Einfache
Sprache, verständliche Sprache” by the main authors Bettina M. Bock
and Sandra Pappert, with additional contributions by Pirkko Friederike
Dresing, Mathilde Hennig, Cordula Meißner, and Janine Kaczmarzik, aims
at giving a broad theoretical and empirical overview of relevant
linguistic research and theorizing on questions of comprehensible
language (“verständliche Sprache”) and linguistic simplicity,
especially with respect to the increasingly discussed phenomena of
“Leichte Sprache”, i.e., Easy Language, and “Einfache Sprache”, i.e.,
Plain (or Simple) Language (see Hansen-Schirra et al. 2021 for a
German-English/English-German dictionary of these and other relevant
terms in the field of Accessible Communication).

Chapter 1 (“Leichte Sprache? Einfache Sprache? Verständliche
Sprache?”) begins by staking out the book’s area of interest,
introducing ‘comprehensible language’ (in the sense of language
explicitly striving for maximal comprehensibility) as a conceptual
umbrella for the description of often quite heterogeneous approaches
referred to as ‘Easy Language’ and ‘Plain Language’. From the specific
perspective of German, and with a clear focus on the written language
(although some parallels of the spoken form with foreigner
talk/xenolects and baby talk are mentioned on p. 18; see also p. 83),
Easy Language is described as a highly standardized kind of Accessible
(i.e., ‘barrier-free’) Communication targeted at people with
linguistically relevant impairments, while Plain Language is less
clearly delimited to a much broader target group and often defined in
direct relation to Easy Language (e.g., plain texts being enriched,
i.e., longer as well as lexically and thematically more variable, when
compared to the more reductive easy texts).

Chapter 2 (“Grundlagen”) tackles the general basics of language
comprehension and comprehensibility from different linguistic
perspectives to serve as a baseline from which to assess the specifics
of Easy and Plain Language in Chapter 3. The cognitive and
physiological processes of visual word recognition as well as of
reading sentences and texts are treated from a psycholinguistic angle.
Then a pragmatic-communicative stance is adopted to introduce several
text-linguistic models of comprehension and comprehensibility, a view
seldom considered in manuals of Easy Language according to the authors
(p. 51). This is followed by a typological subchapter on linguistic
complexity (written by Mathilde Hennig) as the counterpart to
simplicity on an underlying continuous scale, a discussion also
claimed to be fruitful for comparing different varieties of German and
raising the question of absolute vs. relative complexity as well as
its respective measurement in language. The rest of the chapter goes
beyond comprehensibility in the narrow sense in that it incorporates,
on the one hand, aspects of adequacy (e.g., properties of good
easy/plain texts) and, on the other hand, public-image-related
discourse-linguistic (e.g., Easy/Plain Language and linguistic
conservatism) as well as sociolinguistic factors (e.g., Easy/Plain
Language and potential stigmatization).

Based on the general theoretical groundwork presented in Chapter 2,
Chapter 3 (“Leicht, einfach, verständlich - Forschungsstand”)
specifically explores the state of the art of research into linguistic
simplicity and comprehensibility according to different levels of
language structure. Starting with the word (in a subchapter written by
Cordula Meißner), lexical knowledge is identified as the most
important factor in reading comprehension (p. 86) and the difficulty
of words is assessed in isolation, as constituent parts of a text as
well as in specific vocabularies. Sentences (in a subchapter written
by Mathilde Hennig) are syntactically and semantically contrasted from
a systemic (simple vs. complex) and a comprehensibility (easy vs.
difficult) perspective, which includes discussing the
psycholinguistics of ambiguity as well as the relatively young field
of empirical research on linguistic phenomena focused by manual rules
of Easy Language (pp. 118-121). As a hitherto rather neglected aspect
of Easy and Plain Language (pp. 125, 133), close attention is given to
the textual level in terms of cohesion and coherence, psycholinguistic
insights into text comprehension as well as text type and text
function. The final part of the chapter transgresses the boundaries of
linguistics in the narrower sense by pointing out the importance of
the visual dimension of texts (e.g., typography, images) in
influencing their comprehensibility and how multimodality has been and
can be exploited to various degrees in Easy-and-Plain-Language text
production.

The relatively short Chapter 4 (“Adressatenkreise”) addresses research
on comprehensible language for the heterogeneous target groups of
people with so-called mental disabilities (including an explanation of
different terminological traditions and differentiations in German and
English), German-as-a-foreign- and German-as-a-second-language
learners (in a subchapter written by Pirkko Friederike Dresing), as
well as poorly literate adults (taking into account different types of
illiteracy).

Chapter 5 (“Empirische Zugänge zu Verstehen und Verständlichkeit”),
covering quantitative and qualitative empirical approaches to
comprehension and comprehensibility, can be seen as the heart of the
book, since empirically verifying the process and product of Easy and
Plain Language in use is one of the main concerns in pertinent
research (p. 171). After an overview and classification of terminology
and methodologies, the next subchapter (co-written by Cordula Meißner
and Bettina M. Bock) is dedicated to resources, methods, and tools for
carrying-out corpus-based and corpus-driven analyses and studies,
underscoring the need for bigger and more varied corpora of Easy and
Plain Language in this regard (p. 187). This is followed by a
discussion of quantitative approaches to reading comprehension,
spanning the topics of readability indices, general guidelines for
psycholinguistic reading experiments (including their largely
standardized reporting in article form), as well as a description of
several experimental paradigms that can be used for investigating
words, sentences, and texts. The qualitative dimension of approaching
reading comprehension is addressed in the ensuing subchapter and
brings with it a focus on orality (including conventions of
transcription) connected to some of the typical feedback procedures
for participants in such studies. Accordingly, there are
methodological sections of their own on interviews (written in
collaboration with Janine Kaczmarzik), as well as on thinking aloud
and stimulated recall (written by Pirkko Friederike Dresing). The
final two subchapters are concerned with participatory research in
collaboration with affected laypeople and with research ethics,
respectively, which are both especially relevant for Easy and Plain
Language (pp. 246, 254) given the target groups involved as well as
the potential social impact and practical relevance of using
simplified language.

Chapter 6 (“Desiderate”) concludes the book by very briefly summing up
a handful of desirable avenues for future theoretical and empirical
research lying in the scope of the textbook, among others including
intra- and interlanguage comparison and contrast, language change,
spoken language use, digital communication, educational applications,
and social attitudes.

The final chapter is followed by a short list of digital resources
(corpora and software for analysis) and a long list of references (a
rich collection of literature, much of it in German, on the book’s
topics). Throughout the book, many chapters, subchapters and sections
are usefully preceded by initial summary boxes and/or followed by
further reading recommendations and/or exercises, the latter, however,
without solutions or hints to solutions (though this is always a
difficult decision when devising textbooks). Slightly more regrettably
for a textbook (especially for readers without access to the
searchable e-book version), there are no indices at the end which
would allow one to look up specific keywords and locate them in the
text. Yet this is partly balanced out in the chapters themselves by
certain terms and topics of special interest being set off and
highlighted by way of infoboxes, definitions, or excursuses. The book
also contains several figures and tables, but these are not listed in
an overview of their own after the table of contents.


EVALUATION

The work under review is an impressive book-length treatment of Easy
and Plain Language (although with a definite focus on the former). It
succeeds in its goal to go beyond the usual practically oriented
manual style and deal with its subject matter as a genuine field of
research in its own right (p. 17). As a textbook, it is particularly
laudable in drawing together and summarizing a vast array of
literature (much of it in German) for the reader with an interest in
Accessible Communication and its theoretical foundation and empirical
investigation, even if sometimes there appears to be a certain
imbalance between what is summarized and how this is relevant for the
overall presentation (e.g., in Chapter 2, where slightly too many
processing models are presented somewhat too superficially and without
too much direct relevance to later chapters). On a related note, some
passages of the book read more like a general guide to empirical
methods in linguistics than a specific introduction to Easy and Plain
Language and thus would have profited from a stronger gearing towards
these phenomena (see especially several parts of Chapter 5). In
addition, at times potential points of misunderstanding could have
been addressed more explicitly, for example, in the excursus on the
subjectivity of text comprehension on pp. 56-57, where the
text-linguistic terms “Bedeutung” (‘meaning’) and “Sinn” (‘sense’) are
used in a more pragmatic way than their respective Fregean
counterparts in semantics. Similarly, in Chapter 3’s section on
meaning as a factor of word difficulty (pp. 89-90), there seems to be
a tension, neither explicitly mentioned nor resolved, between
specificity as a facilitating property in concrete vocabulary and a
complicating property in technical (abstract?) vocabulary. But all in
all, these are minor points of criticism easily outweighed by the
textbook’s comprehensive scope, topical timeliness, and accessible
style, which should consequently appeal to an interested readership
both within and outside of linguistics and academia.
To conclude, mention should be made of a relatively recent development
in improving communication that shows various possibilities of linking
up with the topic of Easy and Plain Language at hand: the Minimal
Languages approach rooted in the theory of Natural Semantic
Metalanguage (e.g., Goddard 2021). Whereas such a link is already
explored in the case of Easy(-to-Read) Finnish (e.g., Vanhatalo &
Lindholm 2020; Leskelä & Vanhatalo 2021), the potential for Easy and
Plain German is still open to be tested, for example, with respect to
the ideal make-up of a simplified lexicon (identified as a topic of
interest by Bock and Pappert on p. 72) or when establishing reliable
criteria for classifying words as easy (largely still wanting
according to Dresing, p. 160). Moreover, in contrast to the phenomena
of Easy and Plain Language in German still being mainly restricted to
target groups with special needs, the broader concept of Minimal
Language “as a project, a process, to help improve intercultural
communication and clarity of thought” could serve to counterbalance
certain reservations in the general public and to open up to a wider
audience the idea that “[r]unning against this prejudice, there is, or
at least can be, a certain aesthetic pleasure in reading—and
writing—interesting thoughts in clear and simple words” (Goddard &
Wierzbicka 2018: 24).


REFERENCES

Goddard, Cliff (ed.). 2021. Minimal Languages in action. Cham:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Goddard, Cliff & Anna Wierzbicka. 2018. Minimal English and how it can
add to Global English. In Cliff Goddard (ed.), Minimal English for a
global world: Improved communication using fewer words, 5-27. Cham:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Katja Abels, Sarah Signer & Christiane Maaß.
2021. The dictionary of Accessible Communication (Easy - Plain -
Accessible 9). Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Leskelä, Leealaura & Ulla Vanhatalo. 2021. The hunt for the simplest
possible vocabulary: Minimal Finnish meets Easy Finnish. In Cliff
Goddard (ed.), Minimal Languages in action, 53-82. Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Vanhatalo, Ulla & Camilla Lindholm. 2020. Prevalence of NSM primes in
Easy-to-Read and Standard Finnish: Findings from newspaper text
corpora. In Lauren Sadow, Bert Peeters & Kerry Mullan (eds.), Studies
in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural
communication: Minimal English (and beyond), 213-234. Singapore:
Springer.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Thomas Schwaiger holds a master's and PhD degree from the University
of Graz, Austria. He is a linguist with a particular interest in
morphology, syntax, semantics, typology, Functional Discourse Grammar,
Natural Semantic Metalanguage, and the history of linguistics. In
addition to having taught different courses in core, theoretical and
applied areas of linguistics, he has published on various aspects of
reduplication, Functional Discourse Grammar, serial verbs, and
literary studies.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please consider donating to the Linguist List https://give.myiu.org/iu-bloomington/I320011968.html


LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-35-198
----------------------------------------------------------