A Corpus-based Study Of General Nouns In Narrative English Texts

In children' s early cognitive stages,fairy tales play a significant role that cannot be underestimated.Among all fairy tales,the one collection that was collected by the Grimm Brothers has received wide attention since the initial publication of the Grimm's fairy tales,and there are many different versions of its translation.At home and abroad,the numbers of studies of Grimm's fairy tales as well as the research perspectives are gradually increasing.However,there are few studies of Grimm's fairy tales from the perspective of lexical cohesion,and a smaller amount of studies of general nouns in Grimm's fairy tales have been conducted.This is a corpus based study of the use of general nouns in Grimm's fairy tales translated by Margaret Hunt on the basis of general noun theory by Halliday and Hasan(1976).Based on the general noun theory by Halliday and Hasan(1976),the general nouns in Grimm's fairy tales are divided into seven types to address the following research questions:1.What are the general nouns used in Grimm's Fairy Tales?2.What are the distribution and characteristics of the general nouns used in Grimm's Fairy Tales?3.What are the functions of general nouns in fulfilling the writer's goals of writing and in what ways are general nouns helpful to the readers' interpretation of the discourse?The main research procedures include the following steps.(1)50 articles were selected about different topics from Grimm's fairy tales translated by Margaret Hunt and these articles were saved as TXT files,and a corpus of the Grimm's fairy tales was created.(2)Every general noun in all the texts was coded and tagged by the author and another two graduate students with the help of the supervisor until the consistency of the marking.(3)AntConc3.4.4W and SPSS2.0 were used to make statistics of the distribution of these general nouns.(4)Several general nouns which were frequently used of each type were picked out and examples were given to analyze the roles of these general terms in text.(5)The former fifty occurrences of some representative general nouns were selected respectively from the corpus and a discussions were made about when general nouns function as discourse organizers and the frequency of these discourse organizers.(6)The features of the seven types of general nouns in Grimm's fairy tales were summarized and examples were given.Findings of this study include:(1)General nouns account for 11.66% of the total number of words in the corpus of the Grimm's fairy tales,which suggests that in the Grimm's fairy tales,the general nouns play an important role.(2)the percentages of the seven kinds of general nouns are different: the percentages of human animate nouns,nonhuman animate nouns,inanimate concrete nouns,inanimate abstract nouns,action nouns,fact nouns and place nouns are 67.2%,10.4%,10.6%,1.3%,0.2%,1.8% and 8.5% respectively in all the general nouns used.(3)Although general nouns make up a large proportion of the whole corpus,their numbers as discourse organizers are not so evident as their numbers as common nouns.In addition,this study also summarizes the characteristics of the general nouns in Grimm's fairy tales:(1)Reference.In Grimm's fairy tales,general nouns are used to refer to the words that appear in the preceding part in order to replace the repeated use of the deictic words.(2)High generalization.High generalization is a major feature of general nouns,which allows a general noun to include all the meaning of the nouns with a type.However,the general noun does not have the common property of this kind of words,and it cannot be specific to a particular term.(3)Low accessibility.Low accessibility is a prominent feature of general nouns.Compared with demonstrative pronouns,the information content of general nouns is larger,which requires more efforts for people when reading.(4)Unequivalence.In Grimm's fairy tales,general nouns can be used not only to refer to some objects that are mentioned previously,and some action nouns can also refer to an abstract action or process.(5)Openness.Openness means when we use general nouns,we can be free from the rules of grammar and the writers can express emotion and attitude by adding qualifiers before the general noun.In conclusion,this study summarizes the distribution of general nouns in Grimm's fairy tales including their functions as discourse organizers and common nouns and the characteristics of the general nouns in Grimm's fairy tales are also concluded.It is expected that the study of Grimm's fairy tales from the angle of the general nouns can be helpful to the translation,appreciation and research of fairy tales and benefit the users.