We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
A Corpus-Based Study of the Dependency Distance Differences in English Academic Writing.
- Authors
Nan Gao; Qingshun He
- Abstract
Dependency distance has increasingly become a key measure of interest in cross-linguistic corpus studies from multiple perspectives. Based on a syntactically annotated corpus of 400 PhD dissertation abstracts written by native English (L1) and English as a foreign language (L2) academic writers, the current study investigated the mean dependency distance (MDD) variation across language backgrounds and disciplines, which is followed by a grammatical description based on fine-grained indices related to particular syntactic structures. The findings include: (1) L2 academic writers produce an averagely longer MDD than L1 academic writers because of their heavy use of prepositional phrases; (2) The MDD of the linguistics abstracts is significantly longer than that of the physics & chemistry abstracts because of the relatively higher syntactic complexity of the language of linguistics. The findings suggest that MDD can effectively differentiate academic texts with different language backgrounds and disciplines, that both L1 and L2 academic writers write under the constraint of dependency distance minimization, and that L2 PhD dissertation writers have achieved native-like writing proficiency in extending nominal structures.
- Subjects
ACADEMIC discourse; ENGLISH language writing; CORPORA; ENGLISH as a foreign language; FRAMES (Linguistics)
- Publication
SAGE Open, 2023, Vol 13, Issue 3, p1
- ISSN
2158-2440
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/21582440231198408