TY - JOUR
T1 - Syntactic complexity across academic research article part-genres
T2 - A cross-disciplinary perspective
AU - Casal, J. Elliott
AU - Lu, Xiaofei
AU - Qiu, Xixin
AU - Wang, Yuanheng
AU - Zhang, Genggeng
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2021/7
Y1 - 2021/7
N2 - This study examined eight measures of syntactic complexity across published research article part-genres (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) and three social science disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Psychology, and Economics). The corpus of 240 complete texts was analyzed using a modified version of the Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (SCA), and the measures were compared across disciplinary and part-genre variables using a Two-way MANOVA and a series of follow up MANOVA and ANOVA tests. The findings highlight a significant large effect of both discipline and part-genre on all eight syntactic complexity indices, as well as a significant but small effect size for the interaction of move and discipline on the complexity measures. Important disciplinary and part-genre based differences in the use of syntactically complex structures are discussed, as are the implications of these findings on EAP writing research and pedagogy.
AB - This study examined eight measures of syntactic complexity across published research article part-genres (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) and three social science disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Psychology, and Economics). The corpus of 240 complete texts was analyzed using a modified version of the Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (SCA), and the measures were compared across disciplinary and part-genre variables using a Two-way MANOVA and a series of follow up MANOVA and ANOVA tests. The findings highlight a significant large effect of both discipline and part-genre on all eight syntactic complexity indices, as well as a significant but small effect size for the interaction of move and discipline on the complexity measures. Important disciplinary and part-genre based differences in the use of syntactically complex structures are discussed, as are the implications of these findings on EAP writing research and pedagogy.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jeap.2021.100996
DO - 10.1016/j.jeap.2021.100996
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85104141382
SN - 1475-1585
VL - 52
JO - Journal of English for Academic Purposes
JF - Journal of English for Academic Purposes
M1 - 100996
ER -