Abstract:
The present study aimed at exploring phrasal complexity features in data commentaries produced by graduate students and in research articles written by expert writers. To this end, 25 empirical RAs in the field of Applied Linguistics and 158 data commentaries generated by graduate students of English Language Teaching were comparatively examined. The results revealed that students approximated expert writers in terms of producing two linguistic features (i.e., N+N structures and nominalizations). However, they differed significantly from expert writers in generating four linguistic elements (i.e., attributive adjectives, appositive structures, of-genitives, and PPs as noun post-modifiers). The results also revealed that expert writers’ texts comprise varied presence of exceedingly complex patterns of pre-modification, triple/quadruple/quintuple (pre)modification, a hybrid of novel appositive structures, and multiword hyphenated adjectives. Conversely, graduate students’ language could be characterized by less variety, single/dual (pre)modification, a far less extensive range of noun-participle compounds functioning as nominal pre-modifiers, linguistically limited complex modifications, and minimally multifarious patterns of use associated with N+N formulations. Overall, the findings can give fresh insights into the needs of the L2 student writers in developing an academic text.
Machine summary:
(Corresponding Author) Muhammed Parviz PhD Candidate, Department of English Language and Literature, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz Alexanne Don PhD, University of New South Wales Abstract The present study aimed at exploring phrasal complexity features in data commentaries produced by graduate students and in research articles written by expert writers.
However, these noun-modifying phrasal features have remained relatively under-researched with reference to written academic texts generally produced by graduate students (GSs) and expert writers (EWs), and there is little empirical evidence to show how these phrasal linguistic devices are constructed and used to characterize AW tasks performed by non-native speakers of English compared to EWs. The only exception to this is a recent corpus-based investigation conducted by Ansarifar et al.
Inspired by such pedagogical concerns, the current study thus comparatively investigated the deployment of phrasal complexity features in data commentaries as an instance of written academic texts produced by graduate students of English Language Teaching (ELT) and in research articles written by expert writers in Applied Linguistics.
This lower rate of occurrence could suggest that the N+N constructions were not strongly favored by graduate students and expert writers in our datasets although recent studies have shown that the frequency of the use of N+N sequences in modern written academic texts is pervasive and is one of the defining characteristics of the grammar of present-day academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2016; Biber, Grieve, & Iberri-Shea, 2009; Pastor-Gómez, 2010; Staples et al, 2016).