cross-linguistic study of syntactic complexity in the discussion section of master and doctoral theses in applied linguistics

The present study aimed to examine eight measures of syntactic complexity in the discussion sections of master and doctoral theses in applied linguistics. to this end, 60 iranian ma and phd theses in applied linguistics (30 in each) were randomly selected from those indexed in iranian research institute for information science and technology (irandoc) and published in the last ten years. also, as a baseline data for comparison, 30 phd theses in applied linguistics by native english students were randomly selected from online databases. the data were then analyzed by means of syntactic complexity analyzer based on casal et al.’s (2021) measures of sentence, words, clauses, dependent clauses, t-units, coordinated phrases, complex nominal and verb phrases. the findings showed iranian phd students used significantly more syntactic complexity compared to iranian ma students in the discussion sections. moreover, there was a statistically significant differences in the use of syntactic complexity measures between iranian phd corpus and native english corpus. in other words, native english students used significantly more syntactic complexity in the discussion sections. the finding of this study can enhance our understanding of grammatical complexity in iranian ma and phd academic writing and learning procedure. the results therefore confirmed that academic writing instructors may need to include the findings of this study in their syllabus writing.