Syntactic-semantic classification of sentences

The purpose of the paper is to focus on the analysis of compound and complex sentences in the abstract parts of scientific texts. Small-scale research includes 45 abstracts written in British English. The syntactic-semantic classification is based on Quirk (1985). The types of the compound and complex sentences are recorded by registering the conjunctions and other connectives occurring in them. The criterion for distinguishing the simple sentence from the compound and complex sentence is the number of finite verbs contained in a sentence. If the finite verbs share the same complement, they are regarded as one compound or complex sentence. Findings should be of interest to the writers of such documents and textbook writers. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.