Exploring the Impact of Academic Writing Expertise on Syntactic Complexity: a Corpus-Based Analysis

Abstract: Intense debates in foreign or second language learning evolve around English language academic writing as a bridge and a threshold for knowledge dissemination and uptake. A growing interest has consequently been in the way knowledge is constructed via linguistic features which contribute to accelerating the international research publication process. Syntactic complexity, in this sense, has been widely utilized as a multidimensional construct to gauge foreign or second language development in general and academic writing in particular. Despite the growing number of studies examining the interplay between topic, genre, language background and syntactic complexity, few have investigated the impact of academic writing expertise on L2/EFL syntactic and phrasal complexity production. To this end, the current study investigates the syntactic complexity holistically and phrasal complexity narrowly in a corpus of 20 research articles published by Algerian Ph.D. students and expert writers. Independent sample t-tests were performed to trace the statistically significant differences between the two sub-corpora in terms of fourteen syntactic complexity indices and nine noun phrase modifiers. Our findings indicated substantial variation across the sub-corpora in terms of six syntactic complexity measures and a set of nominal modification features including non-finite relative clauses, propositional phrases, appositive noun phrases and nouns as pre-modifiers as well as multiple prepositional phrases. These findings underline the significance of academic writing expertise as a factor for a deep conceptualization of syntactic complexity in EAP writing with useful implications for genre and EAP writing research and pedagogy. Keywords: Syntactic complexity, phrasal complexity, academic writing expertise, corpus, research article.