grammatical complexity in scientific language: a comparison of complex clause in research articles of humanities and science

Academic writing is one of the science language register that has different types, including textbooks, research articles, academic thesis, etc. The goal of this article is to compare the linguistic structures of research articles in the humanities and basic sciences. In doing so, we investigate abstracts of 30 articles in psychology, linguistics, and sociology (overall 90 abstracts), and 30 article’s abstracts of physics, biology and chemistry (overall 90 abstracts). Then we compere the structure of their complex clause from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics theorized by M. A. K. Halliday. Our research method is quantitative, and the data has recorded and calculated statistically by SPSS. In order to analyze the data, we used ANOVA, and to investigate the normality of data we used Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Findings show that the use of complex clauses in the humanities articles was more than the same use in basic sciences' articles. Complex clauses, within the humanities, were mostly used in sociology than linguistics, and in linguistics more than psychology. Within sciences, complex clauses were used in biology articles more than physics and chemistry, but this difference was not significant. On the one hand, the difference in distribution of complex clauses in the humanities and science can be attributed to stylistic variety of them. On the other hand, academic writing in the humanities pays more attention to text comprehension and cohesion than science. Finally, according to findings, it seems that the humanities tend to use logical argumentation devices in writing more than science.