A Corpus-based Analysis of Noun Phrase Complexity in Research Article Part-genres in Applied Linguistics and Clinical Medicine

Abstract

Complexity measures in academic writing have experienced a shift from clausal to phrasal indices in recent years. Drawing on a subset of Biber et al.‟s (2011) hypothesized stages of writing development, we explored phrasal complexity across sections (part-genres) of research articles (RAs) in applied linguistics and clinical medicine. A 389,332-word corpus consisting of 80 randomly selected RAs from leading journals in applied linguistics and clinical medicine was compiled for the purposes of the present study. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent-samples t -test, as implemented in SPSS (version 25), were employed to find differences across the RA sections and between two groups of academic writers. The findings indicated that RAs in clinical medicine relied more heavily on noun phrase modifiers in all sections than those in applied linguistics, suggesting that the distributional pattern of these linguistic expressions is discipline-independent. The implications of the distributional pattern of phrasal complexity are discussed in relation to L2 writing pedagogy and the development of genre-based, discipline-specific academic writing. relationship between syntactic complexity and rhetorical organizations of RA introductions among four social and engineering disciplines. The results obtained from their study indicated that there existed statistically significant disciplinary variations with regard to the realization of moves and steps in RA introductions as assessed by syntactic complexity metrics. When concluding their study, they noted that disciplinary variations play an important role in form-function mapping and genre-based pedagogy. discussion sections than in methods and results.