The impact of the intended reader on language complexity: a contrastive view of supplementive participial clauses in children’s fiction
2022
Abstract
The lecture explores the role of three potential factors contributing to language complexity in original and translated children's literature: the reader (children vs. adults), the writer and the language. To investigate their impact, books of three English authors who wrote both for children and for adults, and whose works have been translated into Czech are analysed.
The main focus is on linguistic complexity at the local level, i.e. the structure complexity of individual linguistic features, namely participial clauses in sentence-initial position. The results suggest that regard to the reader can influence the degree of complexity both in the source and translated texts.