A Comparative Study On The Use Of Shell Nouns In Academic Writings By EFL Learners And Published Writers

Shell nouns are abstract nouns whose specific meanings in the discourse are spelled out by their shell contents. Typical examples of shell nouns are fact, idea, problem, thing, etc. Shell nouns are pervasive in academic language with important roles to play in text interpretation and cohesion, but studies on these nouns are indeed scarce. The present study attempts to reveal the features and problems with the use of shell nouns by advanced Chinese EFL learners as compared to that by published writers.The study is corpus-based. Two corpora, consisting of BA theses on the track of linguistics from Nanjing University and published papers from System, respectively, were built and employed as the materials for analysis. Investigation was conducted based on15frequent potential shell nouns in these two corpora, which are effect, result, fact, problem, approach, reason, purpose, issue, method, factor, feature, subject, aspect, topic, and experience. The findings are as follows:1. The selected shell nouns have comparatively high frequencies in both the published writer corpus and the EFL learner corpus. The most frequently used shell nouns found in both the published writer and the EFL learner corpora are purpose, result, the plural form results and factors. Five nouns are found to have the highest possibility to be used as shell nouns. They are factor, aspect(s), reason, purpose and feature. EFL learners do not use most of the15selected nouns as shell nouns as frequently as published writers, which is most clearly demonstrated by the low proportions of shell noun usage of result and issue by EFL learners as compared to the high proportions of shell noun usage by published writers.2. Published writers and EFL learners show similarity in their use of lexico-grammatical patterns for the occurrence of shell nouns. The patterns "referring item+shell noun"(e.g., to raise students’awareness on...this purpose has...[Note:The words in italics are shell nouns and those underlined are shell content.]) and "cataphoric shell nouns"(e.g., it depends on three factors. One is...) are the most frequently used patterns among all the12patterns, which shows published writers and EFL learners’ high frequency of employing shell nouns in their cohesive function. Besides the lexico-grammatical patterns for the occurrences of shell nouns introduced by Schmid (2000), three new lexico-grammatical patterns,"shell noun+prepositional phrase"(e.g., the problem of eating too much),"shell noun+be+noun phrase"(e.g., the subject is translation) and "shell noun+appositive clause"(e.g., for various reasons, such as the lack of cultural...) are also frequently used in both the published writer corpus and the EFL learner corpus.Published writers and EFL learners appear to have common tendency to rely on specific patterns for the use of specific shell nouns. This is particularly true with three shell nouns, fact, purpose and factor, which are found to be used as shell nouns with high reliance on the patterns "shell noun+that-clause"(e.g., the fact that...),"shell noun+be+infinitive clause"(e.g., the purpose is to...), and "shell noun+be+noun phrase"(e.g., two factors are time and temperature) respectively. More importantly, published writers present a clearer tendency than EFL learners for the selection of certain lexico-grammatical patterns to be associated with a shell noun.3. Four major problems have been found in EFL learners’ use of shell nouns:(a) the confusion between singular and plural forms of certain shell nouns,(b) the wrongly chosen lexico-grammatical pattern for a shell noun,(c) the mismatch between the shell noun and shell content,(d) the repetitious use of a shell noun without re-clarifying the shell content.While this study adds to the literature of shell nouns, it more notably extends pervious research by revealing several features about the use of shell nouns in different corpora. It is also hoped that the findings of the present study can shed some light on the teaching and learning of cohesion and discourse organization and can improve advanced Chinese EFL learners’ academic writing skills in this respect. 属性不符...