Complexity in academic discourse: A corpus-based analysis of nominal groups in English research articles

The present study examines the use of nominal groups, focusing on their types and functions in academic writing, by analyzing a corpus of Pakistani English Research Articles (PERAC). The corpus has been compiled by taking 52 English research articles written by Pakistani scholars in the field of linguistics. After categorizing the nominal groups into simple, pre-modified, and post-modified, the corpus was annotated with the help of TagAnt (2.1.1), and further analysis was carried out through AntConc (3.5.9). The findings of the study show that pre-modified nominal groups (52.79 %) are more frequent than simple nominal groups (39.38 %) and post-modified nominal groups (7.83 %). The analysis of the examples has given the following types of premodification: adjectival (44.5 %), noun (25 %), adverbial (17 %), and participial (13.5 %). While prepositional phrases (51 %), clausal (20 %), infinitival (17.5 %), and adjectival (11.5 %) post-modification were also used in PERAC to provide additional richness and accuracy to the texts. This distribution follows the developmental pattern of structures advanced in nominal group complexity, as postulated by Biber et al. (2011). The findings of the study offer future researchers and academic writers the opportunities to work with implications and suggestions to help students use premodifiers and postmodifiers in nominal groups to enhance their academic writing skill. The present investigation underscores the imperative for additional research comparing the use and role of nominal groups across different disciplines and genres.