Syntactic Complexity of Academic Text: A Corpus Study of Written Production by Learners of English with Russian L1 in Comparison with Expert Texts of English Authors
Abstrakt
The paper analyses data of automated evaluation of syntactical complexity of scholarly texts from four comparable corpora - two of expert texts and two of learner texts - in two subject areas. The research applied two different computer tools - UDPipe parser and AntConc set of programs.
The following conclusions were made: - Expert scholarly texts demonstrated high clausal and phrasal complexity, and its level was higher in Business Studies than in Economics. - Clausal complexity in expert texts was much higher than in student texts, while phrasal complexity was at about the same level as, or even slightly lower than that of students. The largest difference was attested for genitive construction with preposition of, which was 1.7 times as frequent in student texts in both subject areas as in expert texts.
The results contradict the conclusion of the prior research that with the growth in proficiency clausal complexity decreases, while phrasal complexity grows.