Abstract Syntactic complexity (i.e. the grammatical sophistication exhibited in language production) has been found to be positively correlated with formality. In viewing formality as a cline rather than as a dichotomy, the present study revisits previous claims about (in)formality in learner writing in relation to syntactic complexity. The use of commonly utilized measures of syntactic complexity is explored in learner writing and across four registers from the British National Corpus (academic prose, popular science, news and fiction). The results show that while the learners generally exhibited appropriate register awareness, there were some differences noted between their writing and that of the published writers, in particular with regard to the measure of complex nominals. A detailed analysis of this measure in the academic register showed that the learners make less frequent use of adjectival and prepositional modifiers than the expert writers. Our results thus confirm previous claims about the importance of phrase-level complexity measures as a predictor of formality. It would seem that learners would benefit from some targeted instruction of such structures for increased register awareness.

中文翻译：

---

跨语域的句法复杂性：调查第二语言写作中的（不）形式性

摘要 句法复杂性（即语言产生中表现出的语法复杂性）已被发现与形式正相关。本研究将形式性视为一种斜线而不是二分法，重新审视了先前关于与句法复杂性相关的学习者写作中（不）形式性的主张。在学习者写作和英国国家语料库（学术散文、科普、新闻和小说）的四个语域中探索了常用句法复杂性度量的使用。结果表明，虽然学习者普遍表现出适当的语域意识，但他们的写作与已发表作家的写作之间存在一些差异，特别是在复杂名词的测量方面。对学术名册中这项措施的详细分析表明，与专家作家相比，学习者较少使用形容词和介词修饰语。因此，我们的结果证实了先前关于短语级复杂性度量作为形式预测指标的重要性的说法。似乎学习者将从此类结构的一些有针对性的教学中受益，以提高注册意识。