The complex sentence across written genres from native and nonnative contexts; a corpus-based study

Abstract

This is a corpus-based study which sought to investigate the use of the complex sentence and its immediate internal clause combining mechanisms across three genres from the written components of the Ghanaian and British versions of the International Corpus of English. The study is based on the theoretical argumentation from the functional register the perspective that the distribution of linguistic elements across genres is functionally motivated. Texts examined were sampled from Academic Natural Science, Academic Social Science and Administrative Writing. The complex sentence received the attention of this study because it was the dominant structural sentence type across the three genres from these two native and nonnative contexts, a phenomenon we have argued in this study to be functionally motivated. An investigation of two internal clauses combined dynamics among the three genres reveals that whereas the Academic Natural Science genres across Ghanaian and British corpora rely a lot on adverbial clauses, the Ghanaian and British academic social and administrative genres vary in their clause combining preferences, a phenomenon we have associated with genre-internal variability.