Syntactic Complexity : Investigating hypotactic and paratactic styles of speech in non-native extended discourse

IntroductionDay-to-day casual conversation is typically characterized by short turns and frequent turn-taking due to the high degree of collaboration (Clark, 1996) between participants.For students of English conversing with their teacher or other native speakers, this collaboration helps to structure the conversation, and the teacher's contributions act like a `peg' on which students can hang their discourse.However, when students in academia are required to produce more extended speech in the form of a description, narration or opinion, say during an interview or presentation, there is less support from the teacher and consequently a greater burden on the student to produce discourse which is packaged in a logical and coherent manner.While highly collaborative, casual talk is normally taken to be the prototypical discourse act, it is often the case that extended discourse of this kind is used to determine the students' proficiency in the mind of the teacher and university administration.For example, a teacher may assign a portion of the end-of-semester grade to a student based on a presentation in class, or a student may be required to undertake an oral interview in order to asses suitability for overseas study.Both these tasks will require syntactically complex extended discourse to be demonstrated.In fact, despite its a-typical nature, extended discourse is often given greater prominence than casual talk in assessing proficiency.Instances of extended discourse thus take on significance and value for the student in the sense that they represent important discourse acts in the academic lives of students and form the basis for the assessment of speaking proficiency.A key component of the assessment of extended discourse is syntactic complexity.Students who demonstrate a greater syntactic complexity in their output will generally be judged -21-V.Michael Cribb more proficient in this respect than students with less complex output.However, a dilemma exists here for students in that achieving greater complexity in their output is fraught with difficulties.Syntactic complexity demands the construction and manipulation of multi-clausal units and it can be very easy for students to create incoherence in their speech by trying to use complex constructions which they have not fully learned or proceduralized.This paper investigates syntactic complexity in the extended discourse of non-native speakers of English in an attempt to understand how it manifests itself.Syntactic complexity will be examined from both a quantitative perspective, by chiefly looking at the length of utterances produced, and a qualitative perspective, by considering the type of verbal constructions employed, namely subordinate and embedded constructions.The object is to not only explicate the nature of complexity for students of differing language proficiency, but also to show how students utilize different styles to achieve proficiency.In particular, toward the end of the paper, I would like to focus on two students who displayed opposing strategies, one employing a syntactically complex style of speech with a relatively high degree of subordination and embedding, the other a syntactically simple style. Syntactic ComplexityDefining and measuring syntactic complexity has not proved to be an easy undertaking despite the many attempts.One way to approach the task is to look at the length of the `chunks' of language in any given student's output.All spoken language consists of chunks, or units of information, which are thought to be the basic building blocks upon which ideas are formulated and articulated.Thus more complex units will require a greater degree of planning and tighter management of the syntactic elements that make up the units.The simplest of units will be subclausal consisting of phrases and minor utterances.Slightly more complex will be simple clausal units consisting of minimally a subject and verb.More syntactically complex structures may contain modifiers and adverbial elements, and the most complex of all will be multi-clausal units consisting of a main clause and dependant clauses.Multi-clausal units are an important feature of language because they allow speakers to subordinate and embed information within the main text.Tyler (1992Tyler ( , 1994) ) has suggested that the ability of native speakers to syntactically `incorporate' language into multi-clausal units in this way, also known as hypotaxis, essentially acts to bind the information and make clear the hierarchical relations between chunks of information.When students of English are unable to produce speech of this kind, their discourse is perceived as being flat and undifferentiated Complexity: Investigating hypotactic and paratactic styles of speech in non-native extended discourse