The Role of Nativeness and Expertise in Complexifying Noun Phrases in Academic Writing

Authors
1 Department of English Language Teaching, Department of English Language, Faculty of Humanities, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran
2 Department of English Language, Faculty of Humanities, Lorestan University, Lorestan, Iran.
3 Professor Emeritus, Graduate School of Humanities and Science, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan and Adjunct Instructor, Dokkyo University, Saitama, Japan
Abstract
This study investigated the role of naiveness and expertise in noun phrase complexity of academic texts as measured by noun phrase pre- and postmodifiers. To this end, four corpora of the abstract sections of Master of Arts (MA) theses (to represent expert academic writing) in applied linguistics authored by English native and Persian writers were constructed. Noun phrase modifiers were identified thorough automatic grammatical taggers (Stanford Core NLP) and noun phrase extraction tools. Findings revealed that novice and expert academic writers differed significantly in the use of some of the noun phrase postmodifiers. However, the difference between native and nonnative academic writers in the use of premodifiers was not large enough to show statistical significance. Findings support the view that the most important distinction in advanced academic writing is not between native and nonnative writers, but between expert (senior) and novice (junior) ones. Pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed.

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Available Online from 13 July 2025