A Contrastive Study On Syntactic Complexity Of English Abstracts In Chinese And Foreign Linguistic Journal Papers

With the increasing globalization of scientific research,English abstract,as an important part of academic papers,plays an important role in international academic exchange and cooperation.The quality of an English abstract is related to whether the academic paper can be published in the international journal,thus decides whether the research findings can get the attention and recognition over the world.Therefore,it is very important to study English abstracts.In the past thirty years,scholars at home and abroad have studied abstract writing from different perspectives,which have played a positive role in improving the quality of journal abstracts.Different from the previous studies on abstracts,the present study explores the English abstracts at the sentential level to make a contrastive study on syntactic complexity of English abstracts in Chinese and foreign linguistic journal papers,with an aim to explore the differences of the syntactic complexity of English abstracts in Chinese and foreign linguistic journal papers.The study aims to answer the following research questions:1)What are the differences of syntactic complexity of English abstracts written by Chinese scholars and native English scholars?2)What are the differences of syntactic complexity of English abstracts written by Chinese scholars and native English scholars in each subdiscipline of linguistics?3)What are the differences of syntactic complexity of English abstracts among cognitive linguistics,pragmatics and sociolinguistics in the two corpora?The study establishes two corpora: NESC(Native English Scholar Corpus)and CSC(Chinese Scholar Corpus),which consist of totally 240 English abstracts randomly selected from 24 influential journals with higher impact factor at home and abroad in the subdisciplines of linguistics: cognitive linguistics,pragmatics and sociolinguistics in the past ten years.Then six subcorpora are established based on the two corpora.By using software L2SCA(L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer)designed by Professor Lu Xiaofei from The Pennsylvania State University and SPSS 17.0(Statistical Product and Service Solutions)to analyze and process the 14 measures of syntactic complexity of English abstracts written by native English scholars and Chinese scholars.Through the study,the following conclusions have been achieved:1.Overall,Chinese scholars write longer clauses,sentences and T-units.The mean length of them is 21.6016,32.6632 and 28.8160 respectively.However,in native English scholars' English abstracts,mean length of clause is 15.0691,mean length of sentence is 28.3584,mean length of T-unit is 26.4499.In addition,Chinese scholars use more coordination.While the sentence complexity of English abstracts written by Chinese scholars is significantly lower than that by native English scholars.In Chinese scholars' English abstracts,C/S is 1.6099;in native English scholars' English abstracts,C/S is 1.9492.In addition,Chinese scholars use significantly less subordination and verb phrases than native English scholars.2.Through the studies of syntactic complexity in the six subcorpora,it is found that no matter in cognitive linguistics,pragmatics or sociolinguistics,in terms of length of production,Chinese scholars prefer to write longer clauses,sentences and T-units than native English scholars;in terms of sentence complexity,sentence complexity of English abstracts written by Chinese scholars is lower than that by native English scholars;in terms of subordination,Chinese scholars use significantly less subordination than native English scholars;in terms of coordination,Chinese scholars use more coordination;in terms of particular structures,Chinese scholars use significantly less verb phrases than native English scholars.However,the use of complex nominals does not show the consistent results in the three subdisciplines of linguistics.3.Through the comparison between syntactic complexity of English abstracts among the three subdisciplines of linguistics in NESC and CSC,it is found that sentence complexity and subordination show the consistent results: in NESC,sentence complexity and subordination are the highest in pragmatics and lowest in sociolinguistics;in CSC,sentence complexity and subordination are the highest in cognitive linguistics and lowest in sociolinguistics.This study can expand the research domain of studies concerning journal paper English abstract and syntactic complexity.The established corpora and massive data achieved in this study can provide references for future studies.The study is also expected to provide some suggestions on English abstract writing and inspiration for English abstract teaching.