CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE PASSIVE IN GERMAN AND SLOVAK

Abstract

The use of abbreviations in all layers of the specific socio-political vocabulary and in press language is becoming a characteristic of German. For more than 60 years, abbreviations have experienced a veritable "boom" in the German language, often replacing their full forms. The resulting abbreviations exist independently after they have been fully lexicalized. This article examines reduced vocabulary as one of the tools used in various specialized texts. The specific features of abbreviations are described in relation to the developmental trends of the German language. As already mentioned, we focused on the contrastive analysis of the passive in selected German and Slovak texts. We examined how frequently the passive is used in German and Slovak texts to examine the influence of the choice of verb gender on the comprehensibility of the texts themselves and their length. We compare the frequency of occurrence of the passive in selected German and Slovak texts with various usage guidelines. In each text, we marked the individual grammatical phenomena examined, primarily concerning gender distinctions, with the corresponding colors. The evaluation was carried out using statistical methods. We determined the comprehensibility of the original and transformed texts using the so-called "Flesch score," i.e., the value that determines the criterion of text comprehensibility based on certain standards. The higher this score, the more comprehensible the text.