Effects of Word Limit on Sentence Length and Clause Length in Academic Journal Article Abstracts: A Synergetic Linguistic Perspective

Several studies have sought to characterize the syntactic features of research articles (RAs) and their part-genres. However, no study has examined the interrelation between different syntactic components (e.g. sentences and clauses) in the RA genre as a function of interacting internal and external factors (e.g. word limit) from a synergetic linguistic perspective. This study contributes to this line of research by investigating the effects of word limit (i.e. the restriction on the number of words used) on the length of sentences and clauses in RA abstracts. Our results show that RA abstracts contain significantly more longer sentences and clauses than the main body of RAs, but longer sentences in RA abstracts tend to have shorter constituting clauses, indicating that the Menzerath-Altmann Law is at play. Such an interrelation between sentence and clause length helps ensure a cognitively balanced system. Our findings have implications for the need to explore the interrelation between syntactic components emergent from the synergetic interactions of internal and external factors.