A Study Of Shell Nouns In English Abstracts Of Chinese And Foreign Masters' Theses In Humanities And Social Sciences

Shell nouns,a class of abstract nouns used to package contextual information,are abundant in abstracts and play important functions.Plenty of studies abroad and at home have covered shell nouns but through a comprehensive literature review,the present author found that shell nouns in the English abstracts of humanities and social sciences were less explored,which needs a further study.Therefore,this thesis adopts the classification of lexico-grammatical patterns and the functional classification of shell nouns proposed by Schmid as the theoretical guidance,and the linguistic data are the English abstracts of Chinese and foreign masters? theses in humanities and social sciences.The purpose of this thesis is to conduct a contrastive study from the two aspects of the constructional and functional characteristics of shell nouns.The present author downloaded the English abstracts of Chinese and foreign masters from CNKI and ProQuest databases respectively and built two corpora with the size of about 100,000 tokens each.AntConc and Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator were employed to extract and analyze the data.After data analysis,the findings are as follows: 1)In terms of the constructional characteristics,Chinese masters employ more shell nouns than foreign masters on the whole,which might result from the excessive teaching and some individuals? abnormally frequent uses.Some of the highly frequent shell nouns chosen by Chinese and foreign masters share such features of humanities and social sciences as focusing on research background and thinking activities,and two patterns used most by them are N-cl and th-N patterns.These similarities show that Chinese masters can use shell nouns and lexico-grammatical patterns consciously and appropriately to some extent.However,Chinese masters underuse plural shell nouns like results,and overuse certain patterns such as the sub-pattern N-of because of their reliance on some lexical bundles.Possible reasons for the differences are the different ways in English and Chinese to realize grammatical forms,Chinese masters? lack of genre awareness and authentic linguistic data to imitate.2)As for the functional characteristics,Chinese masters are equipped to realize the semantic,textual and cognitive functions relatively well.Both Chinese and foreign masters employ factual shell nouns and descriptive premodifiers most,and they can use the same patterns to realize the textual function of linking by anaphorically and cataphorically referring to shell contents in a clause and across clauses,such as N-cl and th-N patterns,and at the same time,shell nouns in the English abstracts of Chinese and foreign masters can ease the cognitive burden to interpret the information conveyed by the shell contents.The general realization of these three functions makes great contributions to organize an objective and cohesive abstract.The differences are that high frequency shell nouns used by Chinese masters are less diverse in its semantic types and modal shell nouns are comparatively less used,and types of adjective premodifiers of Chinese masters are less abundant.These differences are mainly caused by Chinese masters? lexical deficiency.Based on the findings above,the author of this thesis draws the conclusion that compared with foreign masters,Chinese masters have some ability of academic English writing,but they still have the problems of overusing and underusing some shell nouns and lexico-grammatical patterns,and reasons for these problems might be lack of genre consciousness and authentic linguistic data to imitate,and lexical deficiency of shell nouns and adjectives.It is hoped that this thesis can shed some light on the future relevant research and academic English writing teaching.