Complexity

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Complexity

• English for Academic Purposes
• By Andrea Hermann

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What is Complexity?

• The state of being complicated
• One of the many details or features of something
  that make it hard to understand or deal with
• A result of high lexical density and heavy
  nominalizations

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Foreign Language Writers

• Various advices from different sources
• Stay simple, dont overuse technical terms and
  nominalization
• OR
• Make it more complex, scientific, academic
  language
• Result
• confusion amongst Foreign Language Writers

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Repertoires by Gilbert/Mulkay

• Empiricist Repertoire
• is organized in a manner which denies its
  character as an interpretative product and which
  denies that its authors actions are relevant to
  its content. it portrays scientists actions
  and beliefs as following unproblematically and
  inescapably from the empirical characteristics of
  an impersonal natural world. (Gilbert and Mulkay
  1984 56)

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• Contingent Repertoire
• when providing an explanation of false belief,
  when describing laboratory practice, when making
  a joke or when satirizing the research
  literature. (Gilbert and Mulkay 1984 178-9)

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Checking your text

• FOG Index (by Ellis and Hopkins 1985 35-36)
• Take a sample passage of about 100 words
• Count the number of words in the sentences
• Divide the number of words in the passage by the
  number of sentences, giving the average length of
  sentences in the passage
• Count the number of words of three or more
  syllables in the passage (not counting proper
  names, compound names)
• Total the two factors just counted and multiply
  by 0.4 to obtain the Fog Index

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Example

• Many mainstream movies are mostly linear, full of
  action, run in the always same pattern and leave
  the audience unchallenged who wish for more.
  Because of this development unreliable narration
  has emerged as an own part of contemporary
  cinema. However, unreliable narration is not a
  new invention from cinema but is rather known
  from literature, where it is identified as break
  or contradiction in the narrative discourse. The
  presentation of this group will try to show how
  the literary stylistic device is applied to the
  cinematic style and how it enhances in the genre
  of film.
• Words 96
• Sentences 4
• 96/4 24
• Three or more syllables 23
• FOG Index (2423)0.4 18,8

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• LD Lexical Density (by Ure 1971)
• Number of lexical items divided by the total
  number of words
• Multiply by 100/1
• Equals the Lexical Density
• LD (by Halliday 1985a67)
• Instead of counting the number of lexical items
  as a ratio of the total number of running words,
  we will count the number of lexical items as a
  ratio of the total nu,ber of clauses. Lexical
  density will be measured as the number of lexical
  items per clause.

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Example

• The growth of attachment between infant and
  mother signals the first step in the development
  of a childs capacity to discriminate amongst
  people
• 23 words 1 clause 12 lexical items 11
  grammatical items
• LD by Ure
• 12/23 100 52.17
• LD by Halliday
• 12/1 12

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Grammatical Metaphor

• Simple, congruent coding
• The monkey madly chased the mice around the room.
• The mice were grey.
• Complex, congruent coding
• The monkey madly chased two grey house mice which
  were usually kept in a cage around the room.
• Incongruent, metaphorical coding
• The monkey chased the two grey, soft-furred,
  frightened house mice, which were usually kept in
  a cage that was stored under the table, around
  the room.

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Conclusion

• Reduce
• Words with more than two syllables
• Semantic complexity use less specific, general
  academic nouns
• Lexical complexity use frequent lexemes
• Syntactic complexity use shorter sentences

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Bibliography

• Gotti, Maurizio. Investigatin Specialized
  Discourse. Bern Peter Lang Verlag, 2005, 81-90.
• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2003)
• Schmied, Joseph. Specialist vs. Non-Specialist
  Academic Discourse Measuring Complexity in
  Lexicon and Syntax. Discourse and Interaction 2.
  Eds. Renata Povolná and Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova
  . Brno Universitatis Masarykianae Brunensis,
  2006,143-152.
• Vintola, Eija. Packing and Unpacking of
  Information in Academic Texts. Academic Writing
  Intercultural and Textual Issues. Eds. Eija
  Vintola and A. Maurenen. Amsterdam John
  Benjamins, 1996, 153-194.