Qingshun He - Böcker

Drawing on the rank-scale hypothesis of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this book explores the synergistic relationships among syntactic complexity at the sentence, clause, and group levels. It also examines how these relationships vary among academic English writers of different proficiency levels.Viewing language as a dynamic, self-organizing, and self-regulating system, the book examines how changes in complexity at higher levels affect their constituent units. Linguistic complexity is conceptualized systematically across four dimensions: sentence, clause, group, and word. Dependency grammar is employed as an accessible, quantitative metric for complexity analysis. Through an analysis of academic texts produced by three groups of writers with varying levels of proficiency — Chinese Master's students, Chinese Doctoral students, and native English-speaking Doctoral students — the study identifies features of academic writing related to proficiency and uncovers interrelationships among the four dimensions of linguistic complexity. Based on these findings, the book proposes a synergistic model of linguistic complexity that illustrates how these dimensions interact and achieve dynamic balance in English academic writing across different proficiency levels.This book offers valuable insights for researchers, educators, and graduate students. It provides theoretical exploration and practical guidance for teaching and assessing academic writing.

​This book focuses on the structural diversity, semantic variability, case choice, stylistic characteristics and diachronic distribution of English absolute clauses. The syntactic roles assumed by absolute clauses in the traditional sense can be categorized into clausal adjuncts, attendant circumstances and appositives. These three types of function correspond to the three hypotactic expansions in the relation system of clause complexes in Systemic Functional Linguistics, i.e., elaboration, extension and enhancement. This research, therefore, redefines absolute clauses in the framework of SFL and proposes four syntactic types of absolute clauses: absolute paratactic clauses (elaboration), absolute hypotactic clauses (extension and enhancement), absolute projected clauses (fact and act) and absolute embedded clauses (subject). Based on the Brown family corpora, BNC and COHA, this research finds that different function types of absolute clauses differ in terms of their stylistic and diachronic distributions, and both nominative and accusative cases are acceptable.

​This book focuses on the structural diversity, semantic variability, case choice, stylistic characteristics and diachronic distribution of English absolute clauses. The syntactic roles assumed by absolute clauses in the traditional sense can be categorized into clausal adjuncts, attendant circumstances and appositives. These three types of function correspond to the three hypotactic expansions in the relation system of clause complexes in Systemic Functional Linguistics, i.e., elaboration, extension and enhancement. This research, therefore, redefines absolute clauses in the framework of SFL and proposes four syntactic types of absolute clauses: absolute paratactic clauses (elaboration), absolute hypotactic clauses (extension and enhancement), absolute projected clauses (fact and act) and absolute embedded clauses (subject). Based on the Brown family corpora, BNC and COHA, this research finds that different function types of absolute clauses differ in terms of their stylistic and diachronic distributions, and both nominative and accusative cases are acceptable.

This book presents corpus-based research on functional syntax. It is the first book to present a comprehensive investigation into grammatical metaphor in English clause combining in large-size corpora. By providing a systematic illustration of features such as parataxis, hypotaxis and embedding, it fills a gap in the systemic functional literature.

This book presents corpus-based research on functional syntax. It is the first book to present a comprehensive investigation into grammatical metaphor in English clause combining in large-size corpora. By providing a systematic illustration of features such as parataxis, hypotaxis and embedding, it fills a gap in the systemic functional literature.