A Contrastive Study Of Shell Nouns In Abstracts Between SSCI And CSSCI Linguistic Journals

Shell noun is an abstract noun that mainly plays a cohesive role.In recent years,shell noun has gradually attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad.Its research fields mostly focus on second language writing,dictionary compilation and other directions.There is not much contrastive research on shell nouns in the abstracts of core journals at home and abroad,so there is a large research space.According to the impact factors of journals and the number of journal abstracts,the abstracts of 4 journals will be selected as the research texts in SSCI and CSSCI journals respectively.The purpose of this thesis is to compare and analyze the frequency of shell nouns in the abstracts of SSCI and CSSCI journals,lexicalgrammatical patterns and the functions of shell nouns.This thesis adopts the combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods,builds two small corpora,uses Tree Tagger for part-of-speech tagging,uses Ant Conc software to retrieve shell nouns,and finally uses the log-likelihood ratio tool for statistical analysis.The results show that: 1)In the abstracts of SSCI and CSSCI journals,the shell noun appears more frequently in the CSSCI journals,through the analysis of the top3 0 high-frequency shell nouns,it is found that the total frequency of these words is not very different in the two corpora.The possible reason is that the knowledge level of scholars who can publish papers in SSCI and CSSCI journals is very high,and these scholars pay more attention to the use of shell nouns.2)As for lexicalgrammatical patterns,the lexical-grammatical patterns th-N and N-Cl are used more in the two corpora,among which th-N appears more in CSSCI journal abstracts and N-cl appears more in SSCI journal abstracts.3)The main functions of using shell nouns in abstracts of SSCI and CSSCI journals include the semantic function of characterization,textual function of linking and the cognitive function of temporary concept-formation.Help readers understand the ideas expressed by the author.According to the semantic distribution of shell nouns,the number of factual shell nouns is the largest in the two corpora,indicating that shell nouns mostly state facts in SSCI and CSSCI journal abstracts.The difference is that when playing these functions,the diversity frequency of shell nouns in CSSCI journal abstracts is relatively low.These differences are mainly due to the different countries and regions where the authors of SSCI and CSSCI live,resulting in the different selection of shell nouns and the use of lexical-grammatical patterns,as well as the different selection of shell nouns to express their positions.Through the exploration of shell nouns in the abstract,this thesis can provide enlightenment and reference for academic writing and increase scholars’ awareness of rational use of shell nouns.