This study examined eight measures of syntactic complexity across published research article part-genres (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) and three social science disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Psychology, and Economics). The corpus of 240 complete texts was analyzed using a modified version of the Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (SCA), and the measures were compared across disciplinary and part-genre variables using a Two-way MANOVA and a series of follow up MANOVA and ANOVA tests. The findings highlight a significant large effect of both discipline and part-genre on all eight syntactic complexity indices, as well as a significant but small effect size for the interaction of move and discipline on the complexity measures. Important disciplinary and part-genre based differences in the use of syntactically complex structures are discussed, as are the implications of these findings on EAP writing research and pedagogy.

这项研究检查了已发表的研究文章各部分类型（介绍，方法，结果和讨论）和三个社会科学学科（应用语言学，心理学和经济学）的八种句法复杂性度量。使用修订版的语法复杂度分析器（SCA）对240篇全文的语料库进行了分析，并使用双向MANOVA以及一系列后续的MANOVA和ANOVA检验比较了学科和部分体裁变量的测度。研究结果突显了纪律和部分体裁对所有八个句法复杂性指标的显着巨大影响，以及动作和纪律之间的交互作用对复杂性度量的显着但很小的影响。