The paper deals with the level of syntactic complexity of subordinate clauses in
argument texts spontaneously produced in hebrew by Arab female freshmen
specializing in the teaching of Hebrew at Academic College of Education in Israel.
Syntactic complexity is examined by means of the relationships between main
clauses and various types of subordinate clauses; by categorizing types of logical
connections encoded; and by determining the complexity of the subordinate
clause itself.
Our research revealed three categories of subordinate clauses arranged by their
level of syntactic complexity: a. content clauses indicating a low level of complexity
due to their role as mere providers of necessary information; b. Descriptive clauses
indicating a high complexity level due to their free main clause placement; c.
relative clauses expanding the nominal phrase and creating a high degree of
compression.
We found that the types of logical connections encoded by the clauses are few,
unvaried and at times lexically wrong or completely absent due to first language
interference, or are repeated so as to validate the addressor’s position in an
argument text. Furthermore their subordinate clauses contained many contents
units pointing to undeveloped segments of thought: a kind of brain storm the
writer conducts with himself. This may be the beginning of understanding the
differences between everyday speech (verb-based, syntactically complex, lexically
sparse) and academic writing (noun-based, syntactically relatively simple, but
lexically complex and dense/compact).

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