Measuring syntactic complexity in L2 pragmatic production: Investigating relationships among pragmatics, grammar, and proficiency

The study examines relationships among pragmatics, grammar, and proficiency by comparing the syntactic complexity of ESL learners' written pragmatic production across two independent criterion measures: proficiency and pragmatic performance. Participants were 40 ESL learners who completed pragmatic assessment tasks. Pragmatic competence was assessed by three trained raters using task-dependent analytical rating criteria. Syntactic complexity was assessed using three measures: (a) global complexity from mean length of T-unit, (b) phrasal-level complexity from mean length of clause, and (c) subordination complexity from mean number of clauses per T-unit. The results showed that learners did not possess concomitant written pragmatic competence according to their proficiency levels. The global complexity measure was general enough to differentiate levels in both proficiency and pragmatic performance, compared to phrasal-level and subordination complexity. Yet, the magnitudes of the three complexity measures differences between pragmatic performance levels were more noticeable, compared to those between proficiency levels. Except for phrasal-level complexity, learners' pragmatic performances were more highly correlated with syntactic complexity of their pragmatic production than their proficiency levels. Pragmatically advanced learners produced longer utterances, more complex subclausal structures at the phrasal level, and more subordination, suggesting the crucial roles played by syntactically complex structures in expressing pragmatic functions.