📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
This study presents a corpus-based analysis of syntactic complexity in the academic prose of Nigerian linguistics journals published between 2018 and 2023, providing an empirical baseline for understanding the grammatical sophistication of Nigerian academic writing in the discipline. Academic writing in African scholarly publications has been subject to generalisations about quality without systematic corpus linguistic documentation, and a rigorous empirical account of syntactic complexity in Nigerian linguistics scholarship is overdue. The research constructs a 500,000-token corpus of research articles from five accredited Nigerian linguistics journals, evenly distributed across the five-year period. The corpus is annotated and analysed for syntactic complexity measures including mean length of clause, subordination ratio, verbal phrase complexity, and nominal group structure. The analysis also examines variation in syntactic complexity across article sections and publication types. Findings reveal that Nigerian linguistics journal prose exhibits mean syntactic complexity measures broadly comparable to international linguistics journal benchmarks for clause-level analysis, but shows lower nominal group elaboration and restricted use of non-finite complement structures relative to high-impact international comparators. Temporal trends within the corpus show a modest increase in nominal group complexity across the five-year period. The study provides original benchmark data for Nigerian linguistics academic writing and recommends corpus development as a regular tool for monitoring scholarly writing standards in Nigerian journals. Keywords: syntactic complexity, academic prose, corpus linguistics, Nigerian linguistics journals, academic writing.
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