| Much complex information can be packaged into noun phrases through the economical and concise use of pre- and post-modification. Research findings on historical language variations based on large corpora indicate that over the past three hundred years, modification in noun phrases has undergone significant changes. These important changes include a steady increase of attributive adjectives in academic writing starting from the 18 th century, and a dramatic increase of nouns and prepositional phrases as modifiers over the past century. There has also been a steady expansion of meanings and functions in premodifying nouns and prepositional modifiers. Abstract nouns, for example, as nominal modifiers are common in the 20 th century. Contrastive studies based on large corpora indicate that the prevalence of compressed structures, i.e., phrasal modification, including nouns, adjectives and prepositional phrases as modifiers in noun phrases is a uniquely developed style in academic writing. One possible explanation for the use of these compressed noun phrases is the unique production circumstances of academic writing and the pressure from economical language use. Meanwhile, recently researchers start to review the syntactic complexity of English language, proposing that English complexity should be multi-dimensional and that the use of noun phrases should be taken as an important index to measure the development of advanced language proficiency and even predict the quality of academic writing. The use of modifiers such as adjectives, nouns, and prepositional phrases to convey what clausal structures can express is also regarded as an advanced language proficiency.Research on language variations and syntactic complexity strongly argues for the important status of noun phrases in advanced written English represented by academic writing. Noun phrases have now become one of the foci in the research of second language acquisition(SLA). Some researchers investigate noun phrases as a register feature in academic writing, presenting descriptive data on the use of noun phrases and modifiers measured against the size of corpora. This approach can be seen as macro-level research. Research on abstract nouns focuses on textual functions of specific nominal phrasal patterns. Research on collocation focuses on typicality and accuracy of the use of adjective-noun phrases and noun-noun phrases at a micro-level. For L2 learners, phraseological competence is a huge obstacle to being native-like. In a specific discipline, the use of typical phrases manifests the authority and identity of the writer as well as to what extent the writer is accepted by the discourse community in a specialized area. The present study approaches noun phrases from both macro and micro levels in order to have a thorough and true understanding of how Chinese students in English language programs use noun phrases in their master‘s theses.In China, research on noun phrases as a register feature and syntactic complexity started just a few years ago, with a lot of research territories to be built and expanded. Both at home and abroad, an empirical gap in the study of noun phrases is the lack of large-scale research on academic nouns. Academic nouns are those commonly used in academic writing but different from the general words and technical words. Over the recent years, the production of the academic word lists has drawn special attention. The newly developed Academic Vocabulary List(AVL) by Gardner & Davies(2013) based on large corpora of academic writing over the past 20 years can better represent today‘s academic English. From this standpoint, a study on these high-frequency nouns in academic writing is needed to shed light on English language teaching and learning.As a creative endeavor in a specialized area, writing academically is a challenge to native speakers, and to L2 learners, it adds another layer of difficulty since learners have to concentrate on both disciplinary content and language accuracy. The studies at home on advanced L2 learners, the students in English programs of tertiary and postgraduate education in particular, have revealed various problems in relation to their use of English in academic writing. Phrases and collocations are highly discipline-specific and genre-specific, and foreign researchers suggest that advanced language competence should be studied through the extended writing. This study is expected to contribute to this area by establishing academic writing corpora of a specific discipline--- applied linguistics, to investigate how Chinese students in English language programs use noun phrases in their master‘s theses.To achieve this goal, we built two corpora of applied linguistics, a learner corpus of master‘s theses by Chinese postgraduates in English language programs(CCEPT, short for Corpus of Chinese English Postgraduates‘ Theses) and a reference corpus of research articles from international journals,(CRAIJ, short for Corpus of Research Articles from International Journals), each with at least 2 million tokens. The master‘s theses in CCEPT are evenly distributed among the ―Project 985‖ and ―Project 211‖ key universities and other average universities. The articles in CRAIJ are from the authoritative international journals. Forty-seven academic nouns are taken from the newly built AVL, and they are also the most frequently used academic nouns in CRAIJ. We focus on the forty-seven academic nouns as head nouns(AH, short for academic head) to make this study more manageable. Analyzing the selected academic nouns also helps identify Chinese L2 learner‘s discrepancy in their English vocabulary learning, which signals future learning targets and goals. The noun phrases headed by academic nouns are referred to as academic noun phrases in the current study.Four research questions of this study are addressed as follows:(1) Are the academic noun phrases in postgraduates‘ theses compressed? If yes, what are the characteristics of the compressed structures? What are the characteristics of clausal modification in postgraduates‘ theses?(2) How do postgraduates use academic noun phrase patterns with multiple modification in their theses?(3) To what extent do postgraduates use the high-frequency academic noun phrases from journal research articles in their master‘s theses? How are the high-frequency noun phrases in postgraduates‘ theses used?(4) What are other characteristics of academic noun phrases in postgraduates‘ theses?The most important corpus retrieval tool employed in this dissertation is Power GREP. Other tools include the one to clear tagging, and analytical tools like Chi-Square Calculator and Excel. Because of the errors in POS tagging, the data obtained by Power GREP is further analyzed, checked and modified manually to ensure its accuracy.Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the corpora data, the major findings are summarized as follows.(1) Chinese postgraduates‘ use of academic noun phrases is characterized by compressed phrasal modification. The selection of modifier categories on the priority order is in line with that of journal research articles--- the most frequently used premodifiers are attributive adjectives, followed by nouns, and the most frequently used postmodifiers are prepositional phrases. The important differences are the underuse of attributive adjectives and overuse of noun modifiers, and there are some huge differences in the use of prepositional phrases other than of-prepositional phrases. In terms of clausal modification, postgraduates use more finite clauses than non-finite clauses as in journal research articles. To be specific, postgraduates overuse wh-clause while underusing that-clause and the types of non-finite clausal modification investigated, including V-ed/V-ing and to-infinitive. These findings show that Chinese postgraduates have an inadequate knowledge of using different modifier categories.(2) On the use of extended complex noun phrases with multiple modification, the findings can be summarized in the following.(a) When the academic heads are modified by adjectives, they are more likely to be followed by postmodifiers than when they take premodifying nouns. This is true of both postgraduates‘ theses and journal research articles, but postgraduates use significantly less postmodification when the noun phrases take premodifying adjectives.(b) In both corpora, the noun phrases with multiple premodifiers are not very common, but significantly less premodification is used in postgraduates‘ theses than in journal research articles. To be specific, these differences lie in significantly less frequent use of ―adjective-adjective- AH‖ but more frequent use of ―noun-noun-AH‖ in postgraduates‘ theses. Postgraduates make errors in adjectival ordering.(c) When the noun phrases take multiple premodification, particularly ―adjective-noun-AH‖ and ―adjective-adjective- AH‖, postgraduates tend to use significantly fewer postmodifying structures. It indicates that the overwhelming pattern of premodification in postgraduates‘ mother tongue downplays their use of postmodification. In addition, the overly extended noun phrases occupy a rather small percentage in both corpora.(3) Of all the high-frequency(≥15) academic noun phrases in the reference corpora, Chinese postgraduates can use 73.7%, of which 28% are used infrequently. There are 26.3% of the high-frequency phrases unrepresented in their theses. This finding shows that postgraduates should give more priority to the commonly used noun phrases from journal research articles. 83.5% of the high-frequency(≥15) noun phrases in the learner corpus can be found and confirmed in the reference corpora, which shows that postgraduates are capable of producing what they have read about noun phrases in English research articles in their daily learning. Some of the high-frequency noun phrases specific to postgraduates are an indication of nativized use of English. The nativized phrasal expressions are harmful to the accuracy and specificity of academic language use, and therefore should be reduced to a minimum.(4) Other characteristics of the noun phrases produced by Chinese postgraduates can be summarized in the following.(a) The types of noun phrases in learner corpus are less diverse that those in the reference corpus. This is demonstrated by less frequent use of specific technical premodifiers and a shortage of attributive adjectives occupying intermediate positions along the semantic continuum.(b) The noun modifiers by postgraduates cluster on the vocabulary in relation to English language teaching and language skills, which account for 24.8% in frequency of all noun modifiers. It could be seen that postgraduates overuse noun modifiers but they may not use them well in a qualitative sense.(c) We find a greater concentration of the first few high-frequency premodifiers for a majority of academic head nouns in postgraduates‘ theses, a ―flocking‖ use of high-frequency premodifiers, and a wider gap between the adjacent high-frequency premodifiers in terms of proportion, a ―sloping‖ use of premodifiers.(d) Some improper and wrong uses of noun phrases are also noticeable in the postgraduates‘ theses.Based on the above major findings, it is more worthwhile to correct some biased views of modifier use and to give more attention to the use of adjectival modification in particular while strengthening postgraduates‘ awareness of using noun phrases in academic writing. In doing so, priority should also be given to the quality dimension like accuracy, typicality and diversity. To better develop students‘ competence in using noun phrases, emphasis should be laid on postgraduates‘ reading of more quality English research articles and their use of corpus tools. Chinese postgraduates‘ research interests and selection of topics for master‘s theses are to be broadened so as to acquaint them with more high-frequency phrasal expressions. |
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