Lexical density and grammatical intricacy in linguistic thesis abstract: A qualitative content analysis

Abstract

Abstract of a thesis can be investigated from many angles. This study departs to construe the lexical density (LD) and the grammatical intricacy (GI) in linguistic thesis abstract written by undergraduate English department student of University of Sumatera Utara (USU) in order to figure out the characteristics whether those abstract can be classified into spoken or written language. This study applied qualitative content analysis. The data of this study were all the text of 7 linguistic thesis abstracts. Based on the analysis, it was found that the average score of GI and LD successively is 1.84 and LD index 0.57. As a conclusion, referring to the result of analysis, those abstracts are characterized as written language because of having high degree of LD index which is more than 0.4 and the use of simple language represented by low degree of GI index.