A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study of Noun Phrase Complexity in Rhetorical Move Structures of Sociology Abstracts by L1 Chinese and L1 English Authors

Abstract

This study compares rhetorical move structures and noun phrasal complexity patterns embedded therein in two corpora, each containing 160 sociology research article abstracts written by L1 Chinese and L1 English writers. A corpus-based comparative approach was adopted to examine move structures and noun phrasal complexity, with Mann-Whitney U tests and Bonferroni correction used to identify differences in noun phrasal complexity between the two corpora. The findings show that both groups follow the conventional five-move structure, but differ in the distribution of individual moves. L1 English writers tend to establish research gaps, whereas L1 Chinese writers place more emphasis on research contributions. Noun phrasal complexity also varies systematically across moves to serve different communicative functions. L1 Chinese writers rely more on phrasal compression through attributive adjectives, pre-modifying nouns, and prepositional phrases (of), particularly in background- and conclusion-oriented moves. In contrast, L1 English writers use more clausal post-modification, including finite relative and complement clauses, especially in result-oriented moves. Implications for multilingual academic writing, EFL writing, and EAP pedagogy are discussed.