Walter Bisang is Professor of General and Comparative Linguistics at the University of Mainz. As a typologist, he is interested in the existence of cross-linguistic patterns of structural regularities worldwide. His interest in Leichte Sprache results from his research on linguistic complexity in grammar and from the observation that there is variation across the grammars of individual languages. Since specialists of Leichte Sprache are interested in reducing linguistic complexity, insights from other languages with different expression formats for complexity might provide important cues for the selection of adequate structures in Einfache Sprache. At the same time, these insights may well contribute to our overall understanding of linguistic complexity.
Walter Bisang is a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz and of the Academia Europaea.