Based On Corpusaquantitativeanalysis Of Abstract Expressions In Journalistic Texts

Abstract nouns in traditional grammar and nominalization in modern linguistics constitute abstract expressions in English. While abstractness is regarded as the most prominent operating characteristics of English linguistic thinking, which is the thinking type relying on language and the operation mechanism of the linguistic symbol of English. Taking a small-scaled corpus established by 40 journalistic texts concerning political issues collected from New York Times as the object of study, the thesis aims to disclose features of abstract expressions and abstractness in English linguistic thinking embodied in abstract expressions based on the research of abstract expressions, with the purpose of providing enlightenment for the comprehension of abstract expressions and English studying.The thesis is divided into six chapters:Chapter 1 is the introduction of background and significance of the research.Chapter 2 is a review of previous literature of different linguistic schools including approaches of traditional grammarians, transformational grammarians, systemic functional grammarians, cognitive grammarians. What's more, previous research of linguistic thinking is also included in the part.Chapter 3 gives a systematic introduction of abstract expressions, together with theories of linguistic thinking. All the introductions of theories are supposed to lay firm theoretical foundation for the following research.Chapter 4 describes the process of data collection. the purpose and criteria of data collection, together with processing of tagging. And then the author introduces a corpus-based approach and concordance tool. Respectively, corpus linguistics, advantages of corpus-based approach are reviewed here. Approaches of extracting corpus evidence are also illustrated.Chapter 5 is a general analysis of statistic features and the discussion of the results of the data. First of all, a descriptive analysis of statistic features of abstract expressions is required. Second, according to the description, features of abstract expressions are summarized and discussed through concordance software. Finally, referential significance of abstract expressions and abstractness of linguistic thinking are discussed and illustrated through abundant examples adapted from the corpus, with the purpose of offering English learners enlightenment of achieving accurate comprehension of abstract expressions.Chapter 6 concludes the whole research and points out suggestions for future study and the limitations.