A Diachronic Study of Syntactic Complexity in Academic Journal Abstracts: Disciplinary Variations Between Ecology and Linguistics

In the context of increasing globalization and academic standardization, the stylistic features of academic writing are shaped by both disciplinary traditions and emerging communicative norms. This study explores the syntactic complexity of academic journal abstracts in the disciplines of ecology and linguistics, focusing on disciplinary variation and diachronic change between 2019 and 2024. Drawing on a corpus of 1,005 abstracts from high-impact journals, this study examines syntactic complexity patterns using indices generated by the Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA) and the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC). Findings reveal that linguistics abstracts exhibit significantly greater clausal elaboration and use of determiners and possessives, aligning with the field’s analytic orientation and need for conceptual specificity. In contrast, ecology abstracts favor nominal compounding and adjectival modification, reflecting scientific conventions of brevity and empirical precision. Diachronic analysis shows a trend toward increased nominal density in ecology and greater clausal subordination in linguistics. These results suggest that disciplinary communicative norms shape syntactic preference and that globalization and digital-era communication are subtly reshaping academic writing styles. The study offers pedagogical implications for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instruction and calls for more genre-sensitive academic writing guidance.