Full title: "Discourse Organization and Syntactic Complexity in the Life-Sciences: A Register Analysis of Passive Voice and Subordination Patterns". In this seminar, Ezra Alexander presents a register analysis of how discourse organisation and syntactic complexity vary across life-science research publications. All interested are welcome!
This register analysis examines how discourse organization strategies vary across scientific publications through corpus analysis of passive voice and subordination patterns.
Using a specialized corpus of life-science research articles, the study employs contrastive intralingual analysis to investigate how journal rank correlates with syntactic complexity and information structuring. The study reveals marked differences in discourse organization between high impact factor (HIF) and low impact factor (LIF) publications.
HIF publications demonstrate a preference for embedded discourse organization through passive constructions integrated with subordinate clauses, enabling dense information packaging within single sentences.
LIF publications show preference for sequential discourse organization through more explicit passive constructions accompanied by post-passive explanatory devices, creating linear information flow across multiple sentences.
These patterns suggest distinct register varieties within scientific discourse, where syntactic complexity functions as both a linguistic resource and potential accessibility barrier. The findings contribute to register analysis by documenting patterned syntactic variation within specialized academic discourse, with implications for understanding the association between publication contexts and discourse organization strategies and the development of an ESP pedagogy that addresses syntactic complexity in academic writing development.