Syntactic complexity across journal tiers: A comparative study of materials science abstracts from local, national and international journals

Authors

  • Yujie Shao Jingdezhen Ceramic University, China

Keywords:

Syntactic complexity, Phrasal-Complexity Hypothesis, academic abstracts, journal tiers, English for Academic Purposes

Abstract

This study investigates syntactic complexity in materials science research abstracts across three hierarchical publication tiers: international (SCI-indexed), national (SCI/EI-indexed), and local (PKU Chinese Core-indexed, a leading domestic indexing standard in China). Grounded in the Phrasal-Complexity Hypothesis (PCH), a corpus of 282 abstracts was analyzed to identify linguistic markers that distinguish these tiers. Results reveal that phrasal-level measures, particularly complex noun phrases per clause (CN/C), are the strongest discriminators of stylistic alignment. A significant stylistic convergence was observed between international and national-tier journals, indicating that high-tier domestic journals in China have aligned their linguistic standards with global expert discourse. In contrast, local-tier journals rely more on clausal-level structures. These findings provide empirical support for the PCH and highlight the ‘internationalization’ process of Chinese academic publishing. The study offers pedagogical implications for L2 writing instruction, emphasizing phrasal-level compression as a key competency for researchers seeking to transition from local to international academic publishing.

Author Biography

  • Yujie Shao, Jingdezhen Ceramic University, China

    Yujie Shao is an editor of the Journal of Ceramics at Jingdezhen Ceramic University in China. She received her master’s degree in Language Studies from City University of Hong Kong. Her main research interests are in corpus linguistics, English for Academic Purposes, second language writing, and computational linguistics.

    Email: yujieshao2-c@my.cityu.edu.hk

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Published

2026-06-24

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 3 (2026): The Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics

Section

Articles

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How to Cite

Syntactic complexity across journal tiers: A comparative study of materials science abstracts from local, national and international journals. (2026). The Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 10(3), 1385. https://caes.hku.hk/ajal/index.php/ajal/article/view/1385