A Systematic Description Of English Shell Nouns In Linguistic Discourses

Shell nouns,being general and unspecific in meaning,with their semantics generally vary with the information of the context,are often employed in English academic discourse,with expressing complicated ideas and contents.Based on self-compiled linguistic discourse corpus,through enriching and refining the lexico-grammatical patterns of shell nouns,this study adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,introducing the shell nouns in linguistics discourses from two aspects:structural characteristics and functional characteristics.Besides,these shell nouns and their lexico-grammatical patterns in Linguistic discourses are compared with those retrieved by Schmid(2000).The research indicates:As for the frequency of shell nouns,the top 30 high-frequency shell nouns in linguistic discourses are mainly related to research “methods”,“processes”,“results” and“experimental data".Firstly,In terms of structure,from the view of lexico-grammatical patterns,the retrieved shell nouns are generally used in the pattern "N-cl",in which the pattern "N-PP" is the most important variant.In addition,except for the special case of the pattern "th-be-cl",the "attraction" scores of other five lexico-grammatical patterns to 30high-frequency shell nouns are generally low.In contrast,the "reliance" scores of these shell nouns in the pattern "N-cl" are quite great,which means that these 30 shell nouns are relatively dependent on pattern "N-cl".Secondly,In terms of functions,firstly,with respect to the semantic function of shell nouns,the writers in linguistic discourses tend to use shell nouns in factual class,which is on account of the register characteristics of social sciences discourses.Moreover,concerning the cohesive function of shell nouns,the result indicates that whether serving as anaphoric or cataphoric indicators,shell nouns make an indelible contribution to the organization of discourse and fulfillment of textual cohesion.In addition,the evaluative function of shell nouns is realized by the construction of writers’ stances,readers’ stances and objective stances.Meanwhile,the writers in linguistic discourses frequently use epistemic stance markers,while rarely using attitudinal stance markers.Finally,in term of the frequency and the lexico-grammatical patterns,or from the aspects of “attraction” and “reliance”,compared with the shell nouns retrieved by Schmid(2000)in CUBILD corpus,the use of shell nouns in linguistic discourses are not exactly the same.It is shown that the amount of shell nouns in LDC is greater than that in Schmid’s study;and there are many linguistic terminologies or nouns with stylistic characters in LDC like “animacy” and “metalanguage”,“morpheme”,etc.,which also indicates that the use of shell nouns is associated with writing genre.In this study,the author has optimized and refined the lexico-grammatical patterns of shell nouns,retrieved 811 shell nouns in linguistic discourses,and showed readers the unique characteristics of shell nouns in linguistic discourse,through the analysis based on comparative corpus.The research has enriched the research field of shell nouns,providing a practical reference for further research on shell nouns,and has given some teaching enlightenment to linguistic writing,especially for linguistic scholars who have strict requirements and control on shell nouns and their lexico-grammatical patterns,semantic,cohesive,evaluation functions,etc.What’s more,the feature that shell noun usage in academic texts varies in terms of genres will also provoke scholars in other disciplines to think about how to use shell nouns appropriately in academic writing.