A Study On The Use Of Shell Nouns In Academic Writings By English Major Graduates And Postgraduates

Shell noun is one kind of abstract nouns and its exact meaning is confirmed by the context. There are lots of shell nouns in English, such as fact, point, idea, problem and so on. These nouns could be likened to packing boxes or egg shells, which pack discourse segments to covey succinct meanings combined with specific grammatical patterns. With its frequent use, shell noun arouses the researchers’ interest and has increasingly become a new topic among academic circles in recent 20 years.The previous study abroad predominantly focuses on functional and comparative aspects. Functional studies of shell nouns can be classified into discourse-organizing and stance label. Comparative studies concentrate on the using difference of shell nouns between native speakers and non-native speakers and on the using difference in academic writings of different disciplines. Domestic studies are mainly conducted from perspectives of function, cognition and application. Research on functions attempts to explore the collocation and colligation which can realize discourse function. Cognitive perspective discusses the characteristics, classification and information structure from the cognitive level. And the application research pays attention to the combination of shell noun with teaching practice as well as its information processing in the dictionary.To sum up, all the available studies basically focus on one aspect of shell nouns, such as attitudinal meaning, information structure and so on. There is little systematic description of shell nouns’ functions in concrete using. In addition, deep research on the using of shell nouns in academic compositions written by non-native speakers is far from sufficient. Therefore, this study probes into the using features of shell nouns in academic writings used by Chinese English major graduates and postgraduates and seeks to find out the differences of syntactic-grammar structures aimed at enriching the theories of shell nouns and enhancing their knowledge of the shell noun to create qualified academic writings. Specific research questions are as follows:(1) What are the respective distribution features of the shell nouns both in English major graduates and postgraduates’ academic writings?(2) What kinds of lexico-grammatical patterns can be indentified in the two corpora and what are their functional differences? In order to answer the above questions, the study built two corpora composed of 60 Bachelor’s degree papers of English major graduates and 21 Master degree theses of postgraduates in foreign linguistics and applied linguistics. Then, we use lexical retrieval software Antconc3.2.1.0 to identify twenty high-frequency shell nouns and investigate their occurrence, lexico-grammar structure and functions.The result shows that, first, the high frequencies of the twenty shell nouns verify the wide distribution in academic writings. In general, shell nouns are more frequently used by the postgraduates than graduates. However, the selected shell nouns are more evenly distributed in the graduate corpus. Both the two groups of authors prefer to the singular form and repeatedly use those shell nouns. Second, this study has identified eight lexico-grammatical structures and some of them are preferred patterns of the shell nouns. Different writers use different choices of various lexico-grammatical patterns to achieve their responding functions and most of these patterns signify cataphoric references. The students cannot effectively apply shell nouns to English academic writings. Based on these findings, the teachers are suggested to arouse students’ using awareness of shell nouns and improve academic writings from deepening their understanding of shell nouns, presenting with example sentences as well as strengthening their writing practice and other aspects.