Ibérica (Dec 2024)
Syntactic complexity in applied linguistics research article abstracts: A corpus-based comparative analysis between MENA and international
Abstract
The study explored syntactic complexity variations in English RA abstracts written by native Arabic authors residing in the Arab world and international authors from various contexts. The study analyzed three specialized corpora of 600 English abstracts. Each corpus comprised 200 abstracts by Middle Eastern Arabs, North African Arabs (MENA), and international authors, with a total of 111,645 words across all three corpora. Using the L2SCA developed by Lu (2010), several procedures were undertaken to analyze the data from the three corpora. Fourteen measures of syntactic complexity grouped in five categories were implemented, and the data were then entered into SPSS Statistics software as dependent variables with the three corpora as independent variables to identify any possible differences via analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests. The findings revealed significant differences among the three corpora in their scores on the five aspects of syntactic complexity. For instance, the international corpus showed a longer length of production unit and more subordinations than the MENA corpora. Overall, the sentence complexity of international abstracts was higher than that of the MENA abstracts. Practical implications for Arabic learners and other learners with respect to writing pedagogy in English for research publication purposes will be discussed.
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