A Study on the Syntactic Complexity of Introduction and Conclusion in Maritime-Related Research Articles

Abstract

Syntactic complexity is one of the linguistic characteristics conceptualized as the degree of elaboration, sophistication, and variety of the structures in language production, upon which a considerable amount of research has been carried out by connecting it to academic genres or part-genres in research articles of diverse disciplines over the decades. However, the syntactic complexity features of part-genres in maritime-related research articles are less explicated. To this end, the present study aims to unpack both the synchronic and diachronic syntactic complexity characteristics of Introduction and Conclusion part-genres in maritime-related research articles published between 2006 and 2020. To achieve the research purposes, the Corpus of Maritime-Related Research Articles was built, including over one million running words with 119 sub-corpora. The dataset is comprised of 900 research articles in three disciplines: marine engineering, maritime law, and marine transportation. Tool for Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity was used to measure the syntactic complexity construct. Furthermore, the measures of 14 indices in five dimensions were compared between disciplines and part-genres variables using MANOVA, ANOVA tests, and independent t-test. Equations of deviation calculation and Python were employed to capture the diachronic syntactic complexity changes of part-genres in respective disciplines and maritime-related research articles across the examined 15 years. Synchronic results revealed that, among the three disciplines, the maritime law texts showed the greatest syntactic complexity among the three disciplines in both Introduction and Conclusion part-genres. As for the syntactic complexity variations between part-genres of Introduction and Conclusion within each discipline and within maritime-related research articles, Conclusion part-genre texts were syntactically more complex than Introduction part-genre of the texts in marine engineering, maritime law, marine transportation, and maritime-related research articles. Regarding the diachronic syntactic complexity changes in Introduction part-genre and Conclusion part-genre yearly across 15 years, results showed individual features in the three maritime-related disciplines, exhibiting nonlinear as well as dynamic characteristics. The current study has its pedagogical, theoretical, and methodological implications for future research. Specifically, one methodological contribution is worth touching upon here. That is, the two equations of deviation changes were written to track the trajectories of dynamic syntactic complexity changes, which is accessible to researchers and open to be replicated for similar studies. Notwithstanding the efforts to achieve perfection, the present research is nowhere near perfect, and it has limitations and inadequacies.