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Close repetitions of lexical material can create an impression of clumsiness in the style of Italian prose, while they seem to be accepted with more ease in German. The present study shows that this traditional claim needs some further differentiation. The negative effects on style take place in Italian when informationally prominent words are repeated, while informational background material may - and in certain cases even must - be repeated for clarity. The comparative study investigates lexical, syntactic and prosodic resources for indicating adversative (contrast) relations in argumentative texts from the field of humanities, written in Italian and German. It shows that, for encoding this kind of relation, Italian depends very much on lexical resources, including repetitions of words, while German makes more use of syntactic and prosodic parallelism. As a consequence, German can often dispense with adversative connectives and allows to employ word repetitions for different purposes.
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