A Contrastive Study Of Noun Phrase Complexity In Scientific Research Articles Between Chinese Writers And American Writers

In order to better show cutting-edge achievements in science and technology to the world,Chinese scholars should make efforts to improve their scientific research writing.For that reason,an important step into the international academic field is to explore timely grammatical features of advanced scientific research articles.One important linguistics feature in science research articles is the preponderant use of complex noun phrases.Noun phrase complexity is a distinctive syntactic device to capture the development of advanced academic writing.The master of complex noun phrases needs continuously learning and practicing,no matter who are native speakers or non-native speakers.Due to the fact that Chinese scholars have qualified for the ability to higher academic writing,the focus of the present study is to explore complexity features of noun phrase in Chinese writers? science research articles and further find out the significant differences between the Chinese and native writers.The analysis is based on two small corpora of scientific research texts which were collected from international authoritative journal of Nature published from 2015 to2017.By using software TreeTagger 3.0 and AntConc 3.4.1,different noun phrase structures are firstly to be annotated and then retrieved with the help of regular expressions.To begin with the use of noun phrase complexity formula to gain the overall complexity scores,the study chiefly make a comparative analysis from the use frequency of different noun phrase structures,noun phrase modifiers,noun andnominalizations as head noun or premodifications.The major findings were summarized as follows:(a)The NP complexity values of the academic articles written by Chinese writers and American writers are almost the same.(2.01 and 1.98).(b)Among the four types of NPs,the use frequencies of NP2 and NP4 in Chinese writing exceed those in American writing,while the use frequencies of NP1 and NP3 in American articles are higher than those in Chinese articles.(c)Significant differences shown in total noun phrase modifiers is that the proportion of premodifiers used by Chinese experts is higher than American experts(attributive adjectives: 40% and 38%;premodifying nouns: 22% and 18%),on the contrary,the proportion of prepositional phrases as postmodifiers used by Chinese writers is lower than that of American counterparts(especially prepositional phrases:29% and 33%).(d)Comparison of frequencies for nouns and nominalizationa as well as nominalizations as premodifying nouns and head nouns used by the two groups of writers illustrates Chinese writers employ more often nouns and nominalizations and to a certain extent favour nominalizations both as the head nouns and as the premodifying noun than American writers.The large number of nominalizations cause a higher degree of noun phrases complexity.The above findings shed new light on the research on noun phrase complexity in English academic scientific articles between Chinese writers and American writers.This study attempts to find out the difference of each grammatical feature of noun phrase structures used by the two groups of writers and further provide some feasible suggestions to Chinese writers for how to produce properly noun phrase sructures according with international norms in academic scientific writing.