A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On The Use Of Signaling Nouns In NS And NNS Academic Writing

Signaling nouns have aroused interest of many scholars in the field of appliedlinguistics since1970s, and these abstract nouns excel in discourse construction andmanagement in academic context. Previous studies reveal that signaling nouns are highlyprevalent in academic context and the acquisition of these nouns is one of majorchallenges for ESL/EFL learners. Therefore, it is of great necessity to conduct in-depthresearch into the use of these abstract nouns. Although previous studies have contributed alot to the overall exploration of these abstract nouns, corpus-based contrastive researchinto the use of signaling nouns in NS and NNS corpora is obviously not enough.Using a corpus-based methodology and quantitative and qualitative procedures, thepresent study makes analyses of signaling nouns to investigate the use of these nouns inthe academic writings of NS and NNS scholarly writers in the field of applied linguistics.Based on research at home and abroad, the present study adopts the framework oflexico-grammtical realization patterns proposed by Flowerdew to investigate thefrequency and lexical-grammatical realization patterns of signaling nouns in two corpora.120research articles are selected from international journals and English journal in Chinain the field of applied linguistics, making the size of two corpora respectively1,123,495(NS) words and626,428(NNS) words.The results indicate that there are some differences in NS and NNS corpora:1)Significant differences are spotted in two corpora concerning the frequency of signalingnouns investigated in the present study. Of the35signaling nouns investigated in thisstudy,25out of the overall35target abstract nouns in NNS corpus have higher frequencythan that in native corpus.2) The analyses of lexical-grammatical realization patternsbetween two corpora focus on the six most frequent signaling nouns in NS corpus.Concerning across-clause patterns, data show that for those six signaling nouns, anaphoricpatterns are more preferred by both groups of writers than cataphoric ones and thatgenerally speaking, native speakers use across-clause patterns more frequently thannon-native ones. As for in-clause patterns, it is salient that the most frequently used in-clause lexico-grammatical realization patterns are the same between the two corpora.3)Native writers use of in-clause patterns are more various than non-native ones.4) Most ofthe cataphoric patterns are associated with the pattern of SN+:, and this/that+SN is themost frequent anaphoric pattern. This research makes good suggestions for theinterpretation and employment of signaling nouns and provides valuable insights forEnglish for Academic Purpose (EAP) instruction of signaling nouns.