The Rhetorical structure of Literature Reviews in English and Persian Research Articles

This study reported here focused on identifying linguistic complexity indices in the review sections of English and Persian research articles which can be used to discriminate among various disciplines. Lexical diversity and lexical density as the measures of lexical complexity, as well as average sentence length and the ratio of subordination as two measures of syntactic complexity were used in this study. Another linguistic feature called move complexity was centered around, too. Swale's CARS model was taken into consideration for figuring out the move patterns. Linguistic complexity indices in four major disciplines, namely humanities, engineering, basic sciences, and medical sciences were examined. The corpus comprised of ۲۸۸ review sections of RAs (۱۴۴ in English, ۱۴۴ in Persian). From each discipline, ۷۲ articles were tested. Wordsmith Tools software was utilized to compute the four lexical and syntactic complexity measures of each piece of data. MANOVA and discriminant function analysis were run, as well. The results demonstrated the highest degree of lexical and syntactic complexity among Persian and English articles in the field of humanities. The second significant difference was found among engineering articles in Persian and their English counterparts. The articles of medical sciences and basic sciences showed no difference. This study has implication for ESP and EAP teachers and practitioners.

Keywords:

Literature Review , Lexical Complexity , Syntactic Complexity , , Move Complexity