„… und Asymmetrisches wurde symmetrisch…“

Eine produktionsbasierte und zielgruppensensible Annäherung an Leichte und Einfache Sprache am Beispiel kausaler Ausdrucksformen im Italienischen

Abstract

While the concept of barrier-free communication is well established in German-speaking countries, it remains at an early stage of development within Romance-language contexts. Nevertheless, awareness of the issue is increasingly evident in both popular and academic discourse across these regions. This trend is particularly pronounced in the case of Italian, which constitutes the subject language of the present study.

Numerous manuals and guidelines conceptualise Easy and Plain Language as subsystems of historical languages. These resources are grounded in a robust linguistic framework and aim to optimise texts to enhance comprehensibility. However, it is apparent that the practical implementation of such guidelines frequently diverges from their theoretical underpinnings in texts labelled as accessible. In addition, linguistic scholarship has critically examined the theoretical and conceptual foundations of Easy and Plain Language. Particular attention has been drawn to the heterogeneous nature of the target audience and the overly restrictive approach to permissible linguistic resources. These factors substantially influence the textual, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic dimensions of linguistic signs – dimensions that are often insufficiently explored in Easy Language research.

In response to these criticisms, the present article adopts a language-production-oriented and target-group-sensitive perspective, employing verbalisation strategies associated with a semantic relation – namely, causality – as a case study. The article pursues two principal objectives: first, through a primarily qualitative analysis, it aims to demonstrate the extent to which existing manuals and guidelines underestimate the linguistic competence of a specific target group – Italian-speaking individuals with Broca’s aphasia. In contrast to the majority of empirical studies on Easy Language, which predominantly focus on receptive skills, this article foregrounds the productive linguistic abilities of its addressees.

To enable a more nuanced interpretation of the findings, the concept of “familiarity” is introduced as an operational term. Although the notion of familiarity is frequently invoked in research on accessible communication and language acquisition, it has yet to attain a clear and systematic definition within established terminological frameworks. In the present study, its operationalisation is proposed on the basis of frequency-related, language knowledge-oriented, and automatisation-driven parameters, encompassing all levels of linguistic analysis.