Stage | Grammatical feature | Modifiers | Abstracts of IEEE writers (N = 50) | Abstracts of CNKI writers (N = 50) | Mean difference | ||
Mean | SD | Mean | SD | P(t-test) | |||
2 | Attributive adjectives | AP | 4.43 | 2.01 | 4.19 | 2.27 | 0.577 |
AAP | 0.65 | 0.57 | 0.69 | 0.9 | 0.791 | ||
3 | Participial premodifiers | PP | 1.26 | 0.97 | 0.95 | 0.89 | 0.099 |
That relative clauses, especially with animate head nouns | RC | 0.81 | 1.1 | 0.16 | 0.86 | 0.001* | |
Nouns as premodifiers | NP | 3.09 | 2.27 | 3.82 | 1.79 | 0.077 | |
Possessive nouns | PNP | 0.14 | 0.4 | 0.17 | 0.43 | 0.719 | |
Of phrases | OF | 2.19 | 1.99 | 3.58 | 6.33 | 0.142 | |
Simple prepositional phrases other than of | PR | 3.22 | 2.79 | 0.6 | 2.35 | 0.000* | |
4 | Nonfinite relative clauses: -ed | ED | 0.53 | 1.04 | 0.4 | 1.29 | 0.58 |
Nonfinite relative clauses: -ing | ING | 0.29 | 1.01 | 0.08 | 0.73 | 0.236 | |
Multiple modifiers of Attributive adjectives and nouns | ANP | 1.54 | 1.29 | 1.39 | 1.17 | 0.544 | |
NNP | 0.82 | 0.81 | 1.11 | 1.39 | 0.205 | ||
Other multiple modifiers | 3.36 | 1.65 | 3.18 | 1.78 | 0.601 | ||
5 | Preposition + Nonfinite complement clause | PNCC | 0.13 | 0.43 | 0.13 | 0.87 | 0.942 |
Complement clauses controlled by nouns | CN | 0.08 | 0.2 | 0.03 | 0.34 | 0.372 | |
Multiple prepositional phrases, with levels of embedding | EPE | 0.33 | 1.24 | 0.08 | 1.25 | 0.318 | |
To-clauses | TO | 0.61 | 0.94 | 0.04 | 0.43 | 0.000* |