| In recent years,syntactic complexity has attracted much attention in academic writing.It is used to describe learners’ language performance,evaluate learners’ language quality and predict learners’ language proficiency,which can reflect the academic level and present learners’ academic achievement.Previous studies mostly focused on students with low language proficiency or expert writers and they were relatively scarce for students with high language proficiency.Much attention was put into the entire text or specific part-genre section of texts,such as Introduction,Method,Results and Discussions(IMRD).Moreover,most studies only used the large-grained or fine-grained syntactic complexity measures separately.This research attempts to use large-grained and fine-grained syntactic complexity indices to conduct a contrastive study on the syntactic complexity in master theses and research articles to analyze the differences of syntactic complexity between them.This study seeks to address the following research questions: 1.What are the differences of syntactic complexity of the entire academic writings between master theses and research articles? 2.What are the differences of syntactic complexity in the part-genre IMRD sections between master theses and research articles? 3.What are the possible causes of syntactic complexity differences in academic writing and teaching?This study uses a quantitative method and collects 39 master theses in foreign linguistics and applied linguistics from the website of a university library in 2021 and40 published research articles from the journal Applied Linguistics across the years2017-2021,conducting statistical analysis on 14 large-grained and 13 fine-grained syntactic complexity indices with the help of TAASSC and SPSS.From the perspective of the entire academic writings,the results of large-grained syntactic complexity indices show that compared with our master students,expert writers write longer sentences,T-units,and clauses.They use more complex clauses and sentences,coordinate phrases,complex nominals and verb phrases than master students and 12 syntactic complexity indices are significantly different.The results of fine-grained syntactic complexity indices show that expert writers use more possessives,verbal modifiers,and relative clause modifiers,while master students use more determiners and 4 syntactic complexity indices are significantly different.From the perspective of the part-genre IMRD sections,the results of large-grained syntactic complexity indices show that expert writers use more complex clauses and sentences,coordinate phrases,complex nominals and verb phrases than master students in the Introduction section and 10 syntactic complexity indices are significantly different.In the Method section,expert writers use more complex clauses and sentences,complex nominals and verb phrases and 9 syntactic complexity indices are significantly different.In the Results and Discussions section,expert writers use more complex clauses and sentences,coordinate phrases,complex nominals and verb phrases than master students and 13 syntactic complexity indices are significantly different.The results of fine-grained syntactic complexity indices show that expert writers use more relative clause modifiers in the Introduction section,while master students use more determiners,prepositional phrases,and nouns as modifiers and 4 syntactic complexity indices are significantly different.In the Method section,expert writers use more relative clause modifiers,while master students use more nominal subject,determiners,and prepositional phrases and 4 syntactic complexity indices are significantly different.In the Results and Discussions section,expert writers use more prepositional object,nominal complement,possessives,verbal modifiers,and relative clause modifiers,while master students tend to use more determiners and 6 syntactic complexity indices are significantly different.This study with data and a different dimension of syntactic complexity measure can provide references for future related studies.This study can also help our students and teachers build a more comprehensive understanding of the gap between our master students and expert writers in the process of academic writing,which provides some inspirations and suggestions in academic writing and teaching. |
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