Diachronic Changes in the Syntactic Complexity of Argumentative Writing by Chinese English Major Students
Main Article Content
Keywords
English majors, argumentative writing, syntactic complexity, diachronic change, corpus
Abstract
To investigate the diachronic changes in syntactic complexity in argumentative writing by Chinese English-major students, this study takes the English-major writing subcorpus of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and a self-built contemporary corpus of argumentative writings by English-major students as research objects. Based on the 14 syntactic complexity measures proposed by Lu, a diachronic comparison is conducted on the syntactic complexity features in argumentative writing by junior English-major students two decades ago and at present. The results reveal that no significant differences exist between learners of the two periods in such measures as unit length, sentence complexity and the use of subordinate structures, and the complexity of verb phrases remains relatively stable. In contrast, the complexity of coordinate structures and noun phrase structures is significantly higher in contemporary texts than in texts from 20 years ago. The study indicates that changes in the teaching environment and language input conditions for writing in recent years have to some extent facilitated learners’ expansion of syntactic expressions, yet the development of subordinate structures remains relatively slow. The findings can provide references for optimizing the focus of syntactic complexity training in English-major writing instruction.
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