Syntactic Complexity of MA thesis and PhD Dissertation Abstracts Written by Native and Non-native Speakers of English
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37134/ajelp.vol9.2.6.2021Keywords:
noun phrase, syntactic complexity, academic text, MA thesis abstract, PhD dissertation abstractAbstract
Academic texts have been characterized by the high number of noun phrases; however, to the best the researcher's knowledge, no prior study has investigated the syntactic complexity of noun phrases in abstracts written by native and non-native MA and PhD applied linguistics students. In an attempt to fill this gap, a corpus of 40 abstracts written by native and non-native MA and PhD applied linguistics students was collected and examined. Using two computer applications (L2SCA and TAASSC), the researcher analyzed the corpus to pinpoint possible differences. The findings of this study showed that there were some similarities and differences between the syntactic structures employed in the abstracts of native and non-native MA and PhD students. The results showed that noun phrase syntactic complexity measures (examined through TAASSC) were not successful in differentiating native versus non-native and MA versus PhD writers. The findings suggest that other measures rather than noun phrase complexity measures should be employed.
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