Effects of Word Limit on Sentence Length and Clause Length in Academic Journal Article Abstracts: A Synergetic Linguistic Perspective

ABSTRACT

Several studies have sought to characterize the syntactic features of research articles (RAs) and their part-genres. However, no study has examined the interrelation between different syntactic components (e.g. sentences and clauses) in the RA genre as a function of interacting internal and external factors (e.g. word limit) from a synergetic linguistic perspective. This study contributes to this line of research by investigating the effects of word limit (i.e. the restriction on the number of words used) on the length of sentences and clauses in RA abstracts. Our results show that RA abstracts contain significantly more longer sentences and clauses than the main body of RAs, but longer sentences in RA abstracts tend to have shorter constituting clauses, indicating that the Menzerath-Altmann Law is at play. Such an interrelation between sentence and clause length helps ensure a cognitively balanced system. Our findings have implications for the need to explore the interrelation between syntactic components emergent from the synergetic interactions of internal and external factors.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic journal article abstract
• Menzerath-Altmann Law
• sentence-clause interrelation
• synergetic linguistics
• word limit

Acknowledgments

We appreciate the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We balanced AJAA and AJAB in terms of word tokens in this study. One reviewer recommended calculating the ratio of mean sentence (and clause) length for each abstract-body pair for the 26 RAs represented in the AJAB corpus and subsequently computing a mean ratio along with its 95% confidence interval. The results of this analysis are summarized in Appendix C. These results reveal similar patterns of differences as those reported in Table 2, with RA abstracts containing slightly longer sentences and slightly shorter clauses than RA bodies along with less variation, although the results appear inconclusive, possibly partially due to the relatively small number of pairs analysed and the smaller number of sentences in each abstract than in each body.

2. We balanced AJAA and AJAB in terms of word tokens in this study. One reviewer recommended running the MAL fitting analysis on the 26 abstracts and bodies of the RAs represented in AJAB for comparison purposes. Appendix D presents the mean clause length (measured in words) for sentences with different lengths in the 26 abstracts and bodies of the RAs represented in AJAB, and Appendix E presents the MAL fitting results on these abstracts and bodies. Similar to the results presented in Table 5, the coefficients of determination were larger than 0.9 for both corpora, with the RA abstracts showing a larger coefficient (0.9637 vs. 0.9380). Different from the results in Table 5, the F value for the RA abstracts did not reach statistical significance, and the b value for the RA abstracts was larger than that for the RA bodies, likely due to the smaller number of data points (i.e. 3) for RA abstracts (see Appendix D).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by two grants from Beijing Social Science Foundation (No. 18YYB002), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. E1E41701) to the corresponding author.