Knowing relations between words can help understand their meanings and build a more connected vocabulary network. Here, you can explore parents and offspring and discover the whole family.
Do you have questions about the usage or meaning of “wozu”? Just ask here and I’ll try to clear it up.
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So I was looking at definitions of “wohingegen” (that’s a whole nother story) and both DWDS have bascially the same definitions:
wozu im Gegensatz, während
I was a bit surprised at the appearance of “wozu”. Why not simply write “Im gegensatz zu”. I guess there is a particular grammatical reason?
p.s. I wasn’t sure whether this comment would be better under “wozu” or “wohingegen”. It kinda concerns “wozu” (i think) so i put it here
I think the definition has the angle of “after the statement”.
– [Statement A], während/im Gegensatz wozu/wohingegen [Statement B].
“wozu” is essentially a free relative clause here, with a wo-compound.
– Das, worüber ich mir Sorgen mache,…
You could put “im Gegensatz dazu” as a description, but then you lose the grammatical portion of “wohingegen”, which is a subordinating conjunction (into word).
Does that help?
Kind of makes sense now although it would never have occurred to me that this would be why.
I’m actually going through a list of different Konnektoren and memorising them at the moment, which is how “wohingegen” came up – so its good to remember that “wo” compounds can, in terms of Satzstellung, basically have the same function as Nebensatzkonnektoren
What’s a “free relative clause” in german please? I learn all these grammatical terms in german in the first instance.
Also btw, just saw a typo in my first comment – I meant to write ” Duden and DWDS” as they have the same definition, but I accidently ommited Duden ; )
A “free relative clause” is called “freier Relativsatz” in German. A relative sentence that doesn’t have an entity to point to, but instead constitutes it by itself.
– Was ich gestern gemacht hat, sage ich dir nicht.
– Wer fertig ist, kann gehen.
Or in English.
– I don’t know what I want.
(I don’t know [that, which] I want.)