A Corpus-based Study of Noun Phrase Complexity in Applied Linguistics Research Article Abstracts in Two Contexts of Publication

Unlike conversation, academic writing is characterized by the frequent use of noun phrases which make it difficult for less proficient readers to process a text. Using a subset of Biber, Gray, and Poonpon’s (2011) hypothesized developmental stages of writing, we analyzed noun phrase modifiers in applied linguistics research article (RA) abstracts between expert non-native English Persian writers and international writers. To that end, a 38,762-word corpus was constructed, consisting of 109 international academic research articles (RAs) and 100 Persian English-medium RAs randomly chosen from international peer-reviewed journals and Persian English-medium peer-reviewed journals. Using an automatic extraction computer program (PyCharm, version 3.4.), we tagged texts, identified noun phrase modifiers, and compared the normalized frequency of the modifiers between two writer groups. Independent-samples t-tests and chi-square tests of independence were run to analyze the data. The findings revealed that international writers differed significantly from Persian writers in the use of total noun phrase modifiers, relative clauses, and post-modifying prepositional phrases. Results from the analysis of lexical bundles indicated that Persian writers used lexical bundles to modify noun phrases more frequently than international writers. The findings of this study offer insights into the way expert international and non-native academic writers in applied linguistics make use of phrasal features for complexifying RA abstracts.