Investigating Sentence Complexity in Scientific Abstracts of Kurdish Researchers

A Gender-Based Analysis

Abstract

Syntactic complexity in academic writing is crucial, but research on Kurdish researchers' practices and gender's influence on scholarly abstracts is limited. The objective of this study is to identify the predominant sentence structure type used in the abstracts and to examine any differences in their utilization between male and female researchers. A mixed-methods approach (qualitative and quantitative) is employed to study 50 abstracts in total, with an equal number written by males and females. Using UAM Corpus Tool 3, the abstracts are annotated and classified into types of sentence structure based on Brinton's (2000) classification of sentence structure. For the statistical analysis, SPSS is employed, while tree diagram is used to examine the syntactic structures of sentences. It is found that, regardless of gender, the dominant sentence structure type is complex sentences, and the least used type is compound sentences. The study also reveals that both genders rank complex sentences first in sentence structure usage, followed by simple, compound-complex, and compound sentences. The statistical analysis shows significant differences for compound and complex sentences; i.e., female authors use compound sentences more than males, while male authors utilize complex sentences more than females. Therefore, it is concluded that Kurdish researchers are aware that the complex sentence is the most significant and effective kind of sentence for expressing detailed ideas, and that gender influences how often each sentence type is used.