Lexical Richness as a Lingua- and Socio-Cultural Feature of English Academic Writing
This study aimed to investigate the role of nativeness and expertise on lexical richness in English academic writing. The focus of the study was on three measures of lexical richness, i.e., lexical density, diversity, and sophistication in the published research articles written by native Russian experts and native English experts, as well as theunpublished research papers written by native English postgraduates as novice academic writers. A mixed-methods research study was conducted on three corpora comprising 120 research articles and academic papers in the field of linguistics. The findings showed slight variation in lexical density and sophistication of research articles written by native and non-native expert writers, whereas the variety of vocabulary employed by non-native expert writers was found to be on par with that of native novice writers. The present corpus-based comparative study reinforces the notion that nativeness does not play a decisive role in lexical richness and that academic expertise has a more significant impact on the quality of academic writing. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications in teaching English for specific purposes as well as practical significance in the study of stylistics and textual representations in scholarly discourse.