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<p>&#xa0;This study compared syntactic complexity in research article (RA) abstracts between hard and soft disciplines and examined their diachronic changes across thirty-three years. The corpora consisted of RA abstracts in&#xa0;eight hard and soft disciplines (i.e., agriculture, biology, computer, and engineering; education, law, linguistics, and psychology) from 1991 to 2023. This study measured the syntactic complexity using the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC) and then conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses of RA abstracts in hard and soft disciplines. The cross-disciplinary analysis showed that soft disciplines were more complex in production unit length, subordination, coordination, phrasal complexity within T-units, and sentence complexity than hard disciplines. The diachronic analysis found that both hard and soft disciplines demonstrated increasing trends in&#xa0;subordinate structures and phrasal coordination. Hard disciplines showed increases&#xa0;in production unit length and phrasal&#xa0;complexity, while soft disciplines remained stable in production unit length and decreased in phrasal complexity. This study can contribute to the scientometrics field by deepening our understanding of diachronic changes in syntactic complexity across&#xa0;disciplines and provide practical guidelines for EAP instructors, journal editors, and readers.</p>

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Syntactic complexity variations in research article abstracts: A diachronic cross-disciplinary investigation

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年1月13日

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  • Jihua Dong,
  • Mengmeng Zhang,
  • Nana Pang

摘要

 This study compared syntactic complexity in research article (RA) abstracts between hard and soft disciplines and examined their diachronic changes across thirty-three years. The corpora consisted of RA abstracts in eight hard and soft disciplines (i.e., agriculture, biology, computer, and engineering; education, law, linguistics, and psychology) from 1991 to 2023. This study measured the syntactic complexity using the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC) and then conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses of RA abstracts in hard and soft disciplines. The cross-disciplinary analysis showed that soft disciplines were more complex in production unit length, subordination, coordination, phrasal complexity within T-units, and sentence complexity than hard disciplines. The diachronic analysis found that both hard and soft disciplines demonstrated increasing trends in subordinate structures and phrasal coordination. Hard disciplines showed increases in production unit length and phrasal complexity, while soft disciplines remained stable in production unit length and decreased in phrasal complexity. This study can contribute to the scientometrics field by deepening our understanding of diachronic changes in syntactic complexity across disciplines and provide practical guidelines for EAP instructors, journal editors, and readers.