A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On The Use Of English Linguistic Shell Nouns In Senior High School

Shell nouns are a special kind of abstract nouns,widely used in English writing as an important means of discourse cohesion.A shell noun is like a shell,including some complex information or specific content,that is,a “noun used as a shell”.Because of this,shell nouns are often used in some fixed collocates to realize their concrete semantic meaning with the help of the specific context.Therefore,the use of shell nouns can help learners to better express their attitudes and positions in English writing.But in the past research,it is not difficult to find that Chinese English learners still have some errors in using shell nouns,such as overuse,underuse,misuse and so forth.Shell nouns are mainly divided into six categories,namely,factual,mental,modal,eventive,circumstantial,and linguistic.In previous research,however,most of researchers have analyzed the six categories of shell nouns in general,and have not done too much research on the subcategories of shell nouns,Therefore,this thesis mainly focuses on linguistic shell nouns,compares and analyzes the Chinese English learner’s corpus data(CLEC)and the native English speakers’ corpus data(NESSIE)through corpus-driven approach and contrastive interlanguage analysis,and then uses the corpus retrieval software Antconc 3.5.8 to retrieve the differences of frequency and collocates of 4 linguistic shell nouns with high frequency,such as view,decision,conclusion and message in the two corpora,and further studies the errors in the use of linguistic shell nouns made by Chinese English learners at different language learning levels.So the research questions of the present thesis are as follows: 1)What are the differences in the use of linguistic shell nouns between Chinese English learners and native English speakers? 2)What are the characteristics of the use of linguistic shell nouns of Chinese English learners? 3)What errors in the use of linguistic shell nouns are made by Chinese English learners?The research results indicate that Chinese English learners and native English speakers have significant differences in the use of linguistic shell nouns.First,after statistically analyzing the frequency of 12 linguistic shell nouns with high-frequency in the two corpora,the author found that most of the linguistic shell nouns are underused by Chinese English learners.Second,in terms of collocates,Chinese English learners prefer to use some fixed phrases,and less focus on the syntactic functions or colligation of linguistic shell nouns.Meanwhile,with the improvement of language proficiency,the frequency of using shell nouns by Chinese English learners has increased,but the use of shell nouns collocates by learners from ST2 to ST6 are nearly the same.Third,there are mainly 8 types of errors when Chinese English learners use linguistic shell nouns: they are wd(word),sn(sentence),fm(form),vp(verb phrase),np(noun phrase),cc(collocations),pr(pronouns),cj(conjunctions),pp(prepositional phrases),and aj(adjective phrase).Finally,according to the main findings of the research,the implications for senior high English teaching and learning are proposed.From the perspective of senior high English teaching,teachers should change the vocabulary teaching mode.First,teaching of collocates and colligation of vocabularies should become the focus of vocabulary teaching,especially some abstract nouns.Second,teachers should explain the diverse uses and functions of linguistic shell nouns,and emphasize how to use vocabularies in different texts.Third,parts of speech of vocabularies should also be focused in vocabulary teaching,particularly vocabularies with two kinds of word classes.At last,corpus-based teaching methods should be introduced and widely used in teaching.From the perspective of senior high school English learning,learners should firstly learn to organize and summarize the pragmatic characteristics of linguistic shell nouns they have learned by themselves,and secondly,they should be able to use computers and information technology reasonably,and learn the methods of corpus concordance.