Abstract There have been increasing calls for research attention to the linguistic realizations of rhetorical functions in academic writing. Research in this area has so far focused primarily on lexical and phraseological features. While numerous studies have investigated the relationship of syntactic complexity to language proficiency, development, and writing quality, research examining the rhetorical functions of complex syntactic structures is scant. This study analyzes the rhetorical functions of syntactically complex sentences in the Corpus of Social Science Research Article Introductions, which contains the introduction sections of 600 published research articles in six social science disciplines. All samples were annotated for rhetorical moves and steps using an adapted version of Swales’ (2004) revised Create a Research Space model, and all sentences were assessed for syntactic complexity using multiple measures of global complexity, finite subordination, clausal elaboration, and phrasal complexity. Results revealed significant variation in syntactic complexity among sentences realizing different rhetorical functions and expert writers’ employment of complex structures to realize different rhetorical goals. The implications of our findings for academic writing research, pedagogy and assessment are discussed.

中文翻译：

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社会科学研究文章介绍中句法复杂句的修辞功能

摘要 学术写作中修辞功能的语言实现越来越受到研究的关注。迄今为止，该领域的研究主要集中在词汇和短语特征上。虽然许多研究调查了句法复杂性与语言能力、发展和写作质量的关系，但对复杂句法结构的修辞功能的研究却很少。本研究分析了社会科学研究文章介绍语料库中句法复杂句子的修辞功能，该语料库包含六个社会科学学科的 600 篇已发表研究文章的介绍部分。所有样本都使用 Swales (2004) 修订版的改编版本的修辞动作和步骤进行了注释，创建研究空间模型，并且所有句子都使用全局复杂性、有限从属关系、小句阐述和短语复杂性的多种度量来评估句法复杂性。结果表明，实现不同修辞功能的句子之间的句法复杂性存在显着差异，专家作者利用复杂结构来实现不同的修辞目标。讨论了我们的发现对学术写作研究、教学法和评估的影响。