Syntactic complexity across academic research article part-genres: A cross-disciplinary perspective

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.