Shell Noun Use In Research Article Abstracts Of L1 And L2academic Professionals: A Corpus-based Comparative Study

Shell nouns(SNs),as a cohesive device,are pervasive in academic discourse.Although the use of SNs in academic discourse has been explored increasingly on lexicogrammar and discourse function level in recent years,most of studies on SN are merely listing common nouns that are used as SNs,or common SN patterns in academic discourse,regardless of the features of discourse genre,especially part genre.Research on SN bundles and SN discursive functions in each rhetorical Move of a research article(RA)abstract are sparse.To address problems remained,this study makes a comparison of the words that co-occur with the SN in 4 word-lexical bundles among 5 RA abstract rhetorical Moves as well as the cohesive functions of the most frequently occurred SN in two academic writer groups.The corpora used in this comparative study were Native RA Corpus(NRAC)and Chinese RA Corpus(CRAC),which made up of RA abstracts from both Chinese and international journals of linguistics published from the year 2005 to 2015.Common corpus tools and self-designed computer program are used to treat the data.Results show differences and similarities in the two corpora.With regard to the frequency of SN bundles,CRAC writers use more SN bundles in PTR and STF sub-corpora than NRAC writers do.In terms of structure types of SN bundles,NRAC writers are found to exhibit wider range of SN bundles(V-based,N-based and PP-based)while CRAC writers rely more on clausal SN bundles(V-based SN bundles).Compared with NRAC writers,CRAC writers demonstrate a tendency to overuse V-based SN bundles.With regard to the case study of 3 SNs’ discourse functions,SN lexicalization pattern do not show difference in the two corpora,where SNs worked as metadiscourse devices,with a weak characterization and a weak concept-forming role,thus CRAC and NRAC differ only in the frequency of SNs that appear in each Move.These findings may provide positive result for academic writing instruction in ESP,EAP or ESL.