Syntactic complexity and academic discourse

grammatical parameters in the written production of university students

Abstract

This study analyses the syntactic complexity of texts written by students at university level who belong to different academic courses. The so called syntactic maturity indexes allow us to determine the level of complexity of each discourse taking into account syntax, as long as it is possible to describe the capacity that the subject who is written has to produce consolidated sentences. The aim is to assess such indexes in expositive-argumentative texts produced by students in their 2nd and 5th academic year who are studying to get a degree in different languages in the Faculty of Languages of the National University of Córdoba (Argentina). To this aim, we consider a corpus composed by discursive fragments that correspond to research projects designed by students in introductory subjects related to research. The parameters related to syntactic complexity and development are described in a descriptive level, from a quantitative approach. We conclude that the averages of clauses per terminal unit, as well as the intensity of embedding (compared to other indexes) establish significant differences between the subjects of both groups with respect to their grammatical competence to write academic discourses.