Article published In:
International Journal of Learner Corpus Research: Online-First ArticlesComparing theory-based models of grammatical complexity in student writing
The present study tests the empirical adequacy of competing models of grammatical complexity in university student writing, based on analysis of disciplinary texts from L1-English and L2-English students. The results show that grammatical complexity in student writing must be treated as a multi-dimensional linguistic construct, distinguishing among both structural types and syntactic functions. We compare the results here to previous research (Biber et al., 2024a, b), showing a similar patterning of complexity features in student writing and the broader domain of general writing. Two of these groupings – dependent phrases functioning as noun modifiers, and finite dependent clauses functioning as clause-level constituents – are especially interesting. These two groupings represent the strongest co-occurrence patterns in general writing, but only the dependent clause grouping is represented in student writing. This discrepancy is interpreted relative to the development of advanced proficiency in the use of complexity features by university students.
Keywords: grammatical complexity, dependent clauses, dependent phrases, syntactic functions, written register variation, university student writing
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.A survey of previous complexity research on written learner language
- 2.1The Measurement Approach
- 2.2The Descriptive Grammar Approach
- 2.3A comparison of the linguistic basis of Measurement Approaches versus Descriptive Grammar Approaches
- 3.The specific hypotheses: Motivating the models of grammatical complexity
- 4.Corpus, linguistic analyses, and statistical methods
- 5.Evaluation of the complexity models
- 6.Stereotypical clausal and phrasal complexity
- 7.Summary and conclusion
- Notes
-
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