J. Elliott Casal
The Linguistics Colloquium series presents Ohio University alumnus J. Elliott Casal discussing “Complex Noun Phrases and Holistic Syntactic Complexity in Niche-Building Moves: Addressing the ‘Function-Form Gap’ with Corpus-Based Genre Analysis”on Friday, April 12, from 12:55 to 1:55 p.m. in Gordy 301.
Casal is a doctoral candidate at Penn State in Applied Linguistics. He is former ELIP teaching assistant and a graduate of the M.A. in Applied Linguistics program here at OHIO.
Overview: Although an emerging line of research explores the characteristic linguistic features of disciplinary genres in terms of the rhetorical goals they realize (e.g., Cortes, 2013; Omidian, Shahriari, & Siyanova-Chanturia, 2018; Tankó, 2017), Moreno and Swales (2018) point out that a ‘function-form gap’ still exists in genre research. In this talk, I will present part of an ongoing corpus-based genre analysis project aimed to address this gap by exploring how writers of social sciences research articles use syntactically complex structures to ‘establish a niche’ for their research. Data consist of 600 recently published research articles across six social sciences disciplines. Using a modified version of Swales’ (2004) revised Creating a Research Space model, these texts have been tagged for rhetorical moves and steps by a research team. I identify complex noun phrases and other syntactically complex structures and compare writers’ use of such structures in niche-building moves to their use of such structures elsewhere in the text. A range of holistic syntactic complexity measures are analyzed using Python and Lu’s (2010) automated L2SCA complexity analyzer, and particular complex noun-phrase structures are analyzed using Stanford Tregex (Levy & Andrews, 2006). I will reflect on how these complex structures may allow writers to achieve their niche-building goals.
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