A Contrastive Study On The Use Of Shell Nouns In Ma Theses By Students In China And English-speaking Countries

Shell nouns,as a special kind of abstract nouns,are frequently used in English academic discourse.The appropriate use of shell nouns concerns the coherence of academic discourse,and determines whether the author can effectively express his opinions and stance.Therefore,the use of shell nouns constitutes an important and challenging issue in the teaching and learning of how to write high-quality academic discourse.It has been a hot issue in the field of applied linguistics and English for Academic Purposes(EAP)in particular to explore the differences and similarities in academic writings of English between the postgraduate students in foreign language context and the students in the native English language context by focusing on their degree theses.However,the research on the use of shell nouns is comparatively inadequate.In view of this,on the basis of Jiang’s(2015)taxonomy of shell nouns and analysis of stance expression of shell nouns in the structure of “Noun-complement”,this thesis attempts to explore the similarities and differences in the use of shell nouns in English academic writings by the students in Chinese universities and their counterparts in English-speaking countries(hereafter Chinese students and foreign students in short),hoping to provide pedagogical reference for the teaching and learning of English academic writing in China.This study focuses on the following two research questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the frequency of shell nouns used by Chinese students and foreign students?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the use of shell nouns in the writings by Chinese students and foreign students in terms of lexico-grammatical patterns and the way to express their stance?To answer the above-mentioned questions,this study selected 60 MA theses in Applied Linguistics as the research object,of which 30 pieces written by foreign students from the institutes in English-speaking countries are downloaded from Pro Quest Dissertation & Theses(PQDT)database,the other 30 written by the postgraduate students in China are from China Master’s Theses Full-text Database(CMFD),an important sub-database of CNKI.The research instruments include Treetagger 3.2,Ant Conc 3.5.7,Microsoft Excel 2010.The findings are as follows:(1)The total frequency of shell nouns used by foreign students is slightly higher than that by Chinese students.However,both two groups of students employ a variety of shell nouns in English academic writings.They both have the preference to use more singular forms than the plural forms of shell nouns.(2)For both two groups of students,the variant “Noun-that clause”(i.e.N-that)is used most frequently.However,Chinese students are overall not as capable as foreign students in using the four variants of the lexico-grammatical pattern of “Noun-complement clause”(i.e.N-cl).As for the selection of shell nouns used to express stance,both two groups of students tend to use the entity nouns.The frequency of the relation nouns is the lowest,suggesting that they both lack the competence in further elaborating and discussing opinions.In addition,the frequency of the attribution nouns used by Chinese students is similar to that by foreign students and lower than that of the entity nouns,which is different from Jiang’s(2015)finding.