How complex is professional academic writing? A corpus-based analysis of research articles in 'hard' and 'soft' disciplines

This study focuses on the analysis of linguistic complexity in professional academic writing light empirical evidence provided by a 1,597,000-word corpus ‘hard’ (life and physical sciences) ‘soft’ (arts social) scientific research articles published leading peer-review journals. Specifically, this investigation aims both to describe features texts written authors test hypothesis that varies across disciplines. Since previous studies have revealed automatic indices do not sufficiently succeed providing comprehensive description texts, paper has been measured two ways: quantitatively through indexes Lu’s (2010) L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyser, more qualitative selection metrics associated with clausal phrasal seminal studies. The data show, first, syntactic (basically, strategies coordination subordination) are statistically relevant characterisation specifically soft-science disciplines; second, there is continuum subdisciplines within broad distinction soft versus hard genres; and, third, genre demonstrates stable productivity clausal-complexity strategies, while phrasal-complexity pervasive hard-science subcorpus.