Specialized Academic Writing: Syntactic Complexity Rhetorical Functions in EFL Applied Linguistics Research Article Abstracts

Abstract

The form-function relationship in academic writing has been evidenced to serve the communicative goals sought in scholarly research writing. Syntactically complex structures are linguistic devices that have been shown to realize different rhetorical functions in this genre, and syntactic complexity development has been demonstrated to follow pre-established stages and to reflect a nominal style at advanced levels. This study examines the extent to which Moroccan applied linguistics researchers use syntactically complex structures to accomplish communicative functions within a research article abstract. A corpus of 60 applied linguistics research article abstracts published between 2020 and 2025 was compiled, and the abstracts were annotated following the five rhetorical functions in Swales’s Moves framework. The syntactic complexity features used to achieve each of these functions were identified and situated within Biber et al.’s syntactic complexity developmental stages. The data analysis yielded results indicating a uniform overreliance on attribute adjectives and nouns as noun pre-modifiers and prepositional phrases as noun post-modifiers (lower syntactic complexity developmental stage features) to accomplish rhetorical functions across all the abstract moves. Higher syntactic complexity stages features—nonfinite relative clauses and apposition—and nominalization, a central feature of scholarly research writing, were found to be underused. These findings call for the necessity of raising awareness of the form-function relationship in academic writing and the effectiveness of the strategic variable use of linguistic features to achieve communicative purposes in scholarly research writing characterized by a compressed style and the packing of information within sentences. This study provides an opportunity to advance the understanding of academic writing instruction and development in EFL contexts and offers insights into how to facilitate integration into disciplinary scholarly research writing communities of practice.