Al Sahlanee, Ali Yasir Fahad
(2023)
Comparison Of Syntactic And Lexical
Complexities In Research Articles By
Iraqi And Non-Iraqi Writers.
PhD thesis, Universiti Sains Malaysia.
Abstract
Publication productivity is an essential metric of the performance of academics
and higher learning. It is directly affecting institutions' ranking and reputation. Writing
for publication is signified as high-quality writing that uses advanced complex lexical
units and syntactic structures to convey complex scientific findings. Linguistic
complexity investigates complexity at lexical and syntactic levels; it is perceived as a
reliable indicator of writing quality, proficiency, and development. Given the issue of
the low publication productivity of Iraqi writers in peer-reviewed international
journals, this descriptive study was implemented to evaluate and compare the use of
complex lexical items and syntactic structures in the writing of linguistics research
articles (RAs) written by Iraqi, English second language (L2), and English first
language (L1) writers. Using the Contrastive Rhetorical Theory underpinnings, the
corpus of this study includes 150 linguistics RAs published in international journals
indexed in the Scopus database, mainly 50 linguistics RAs each by Iraqi writers,
English L2, and English L1 writers. This study followed Wood et al. (2001) criteria to
classify English L1 and L2 writers. The texts were analysed using the Lexical
Complexity Analyser (LCA) and Syntactic Complexity Analyser (SCA). The findings
revealed that Iraqi writers utilised the lowest number of complex lexical items and
syntactic structures in their RAs compared to the texts written by English L2 and L1
writers.
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