Language Contact and Syntactic Complexity: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Clause Structure in Pakistani English Research Articles

Abstract

The study investigates the syntactic complexity in Pakistani research articles. The focus of the research is on academic texts produced by Pakistani scholars and published in international journals. A mixed-methods research design is employed to examine the factors contributing to syntactic complexity in Pakistani English academic writing. This research mainly focuses on the complementation clause (that-clause) and other embedded clauses, which contribute to the syntactic complexity in writing. The syntactic measurement is examined using the key indices of Lu (2010), which present a statistical analysis of clausal structure. In this perspective, Weinrich’s (2010) syntactic theory is used to explain the qualitative findings. The sample for the study comprises internationally published research articles with Pakistani 1st author publications. The articles are converted into a specialized corpus. There are 96 files or research articles included in the study. Examples of clauses are extracted using AntConc (3.5.9). The findings reveal that dominant complementation clauses are prevalent in Pakistani academic writing. The syntactic structure is often complex, which highlights the embedding of local languages. In academic discourse, language is strongly influenced by a multilingual perspective (Weinrich, 2010). Pakistani English is a highly contact language, and studying it is very significant from an academic writing perspective.