Clausal and Phrasal Complexities in Nonnative Writers’ English Composition: A Comparative Analysis

Clausal and Phrasal Complexities in Nonnative Writers’ English Composition: A Comparative Analysis

This study investigates the textual features of nonnative writers’ English composition at two differing levels (clausal and phrasal). Two student groups wrote English essays and these data were analyzed for syntactic complexities using TAASSC and WordSmith Tools. The preliminary analyses were done via WordSmith in a way to identify the global features of each data set, including TTR ratio, mean of words per sentence, and density of content and function words. In the subsequent analyses, these data were processed for syntactic structures via TAASSC to identify clausal and phrasal complexities in each text. The results show that the general features reflected in WordSmith outcomes were rather peculiar in that the occurrence of function words was a lot higher than content words in frequency of word lists in both groups. The results of TAASSC analyses indicate that the highest score was found in subordinating conjunction among the clausal indexes in each data set, following which adverbial clause and clausal complement served as the second and third contributors to clausal complexities in each corpus. For the phrasal complexities, determiner served as the strongest index in the graduate group, followed by adjectival modifiers and prepositional phrases as the second and third indices. Yet such strength of determiner as an index for phrasal complexity was not verified in the undergraduate group, in which adjectival modifier was counted as the highest contributor to the phrasal complexity in the group. (234 words)