| Syntactic complexity refers to the scope of the form of language output as well as the degree of its sophistication while semantic coherence indicates that whether or not the semantic meanings of the output language are coherent.Syntactic complexity and semantic coherence have always been important indicators in measuring the quality of L2 writings from the perspectives of formal linguistics and functional linguistics.In recent years,the issue of syntactic complexity and semantic coherence have attracted widespread attention at home and abroad,and have achieved great development.However,there are still some limitations in the existing studies.Previous studies have focused on the study of some surface indicators,but lacked exploration of deep indicators such as latent semantics.In the past,the research on syntactic complexity in the academic field also had fewer indices and relatively small research samples.In addition,most of the previous studies focused solely on syntactic complexity or semantic coherence,few studies have combined syntactic complexity and semantic coherence as one research field.Therefore,the main goal of this study is a systematic and exhaustive study of the syntactic complexity and semantic coherence of the argumentative writings of senior English majors compared with native English speakers.Using Chinese and English corpora and SPSS is the main research methods adopted in this study.With the help of two automated analysis tools,the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)and Coh-Metrix,this paper selected 172 essays from Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL)and Louvain Corpus Native English Essays(LOCNESS)respectively and did some comparative analyses as follows:(1)The syntactic complexity is analyzed from 14 indicators in six aspects,such as mean length of production and so on.(2)Semantic coherence is analyzed from four perspectives of latent semantic analysis.Through the use of automated analysis tools to analyze a large number of texts,this paper aims to explore the difference between the low-scored group and the high-scored group,as well as the difference between senior English majors and native English speakers in various syntactic complexity and latent semantic analysis indicators.(3)This paper also tries to study the relationship between those indicators and writing quality.The results of this research may hopefully provide some suggestions for future writing teaching.After using SPSS to perform independent sample t-test on the data,a One-way ANOVA test and the correlation test,the major findings of this study are shown as follows:Initially,high-scored group and low-scored group showed significant differences in multiple syntactic complexity and semantic coherence measures.The result is the following:(1)High-scored group uses more T-units and C-units than low-scored group,but still less than native speakers.(2)In the subordinate structure and coordinate structure,the difference between the high-scored and low-scored groups is not significant,but it is quite different from the native speakers.(3)In terms of particular structure,high-scored group adopts more complex noun phrases than low-scored group.Secondly,in terms of semantic coherence,the mean values of LSA overlap,adjacent sentences(LSASS1),LSA overlap,all sentences in paragraph(LSASSp)and LSA overlap,adjacent paragraphs(LSAPP1)of high-scored group are higher than low-scored group,but those of LSAPP1 are higher than native speakers.The numbers of LSA given/new(LSAGN)in low-scored group are higher than high-scored group,in other words,high-scored group focused more on semantic coherence than low-scored group.Thirdly,as to the relationship between those measurement indicators and writing quality,most of the indicators can effectively give feedback to the writer's writing proficiency,except the Mean Length of Sentence(MLS)and T-unit per Sentence(T/S).According to the latent semantic analysis index,it is clear that LSASS1 and LSASSp are positively correlated with composition quality while LSAPP1 is negatively correlated with composition quality,and LSAGN has nothing to do with writing quality.The research significance are as follows:(1)This research studies both syntactic complexity and semantic coherence.It enriches the research on second language writing theoretically,and also attempts to solve the problems of adopting insufficient indicators and samples in previous studies.(2)In terms of research methods,this study uses two corpora and automated analysis softwares,which verify the effectiveness of these tools and provide new ideas for future research methods.(3)In practice,this study provides inspiration for both teachers and students.Teachers should guide students to pay attention to the use of a variety of effective syntactic complexity skills,while using reasonable cohesive means to construct the semantic coherence of the article to complete a good writing. |
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