Corpus-based Analysis Of Shell Noun Errors In Non-english Majors’ Writing

With vocabulary ascending as one of the most important parts in SecondLanguage Acquisition (SLA), shell nouns, such as fact, thing, idea, conclusion,factor and so on, as a kind of abstract nouns, have drawn more and more attention.Previous studies on shell nouns are mainly preceded from the perspectives ofLinguistics, Lexicography and SLA. In Linguistics, studies are mainly conductedfrom Systemic Functional Linguistics as well as Cognitive Linguistics (CL).Research of Systemic Functional Linguistics focuses on cohesive function of shellnouns for their role in understanding discourses. CL attempts to investigate thecognitive features and functions of shell nouns. And Lexicography sets out to explorehow to deal with information representation of shell nouns and their grammarpatterns in dictionaries. Besides, there are some studies which shed light on thecomparative research of shell noun use by native speakers and English learners inSLA. However, there are still a lot of insufficiencies in the study of shell noun errorsin second language learning from a combined perspective of SLA and Linguistics.Hence, grounded on the previous studies, this thesis aims at finding out shell nounerrors in writing by non-English majors of Chinese colleges and tries to interpret thereasons for these errors from both the linguistic perspective and the cognitiveperspective, in an attempt to provide some implications in teaching and learning ofshell nouns.With two sub-corpora, ST3and ST4of Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC)and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as the research instruments,taking three common and frequently used shell nouns (idea, purpose and reason) asthe research subject, this paper diagnoses these three shell noun errors, collects andclassifies them and tries to answer the following three research questions:1. What are shell noun errors in non-English majors’ writing?2. What is the distribution of shell noun errors in ST3and ST4of CLEC? 3. What are the causes for shell noun errors in non-English majors’ writing?Based on data analysis and discussion, there are several major findings asfollows:Firstly, as for shell noun errors in non-English majors’ writing, according to thefrequency and type of error, there are eight kinds of errors which list as follows: first,misuse of singular and plural forms and agreement of certain shell nouns; second,inappropriate determiner of or preposition collocation with certain shell nouns; third,wrongly chosen shell-content construction of a shell noun; fourth, mismatch of shellnouns or shell contents; fifth, redundant use between a certain shell noun and othermeaning-equated information in contexts; sixth, repetitious use of a certain shellnoun without re-stating the shell content; seventh, run-on sentences in shell-contentconstruction; eighth, misuse of a shell noun’s set phrase. And among which, the firstthree errors are most common that enlightens us enough attention has to be paid tothem in language teaching and learning.Secondly, as for the distribution of shell noun errors in ST3and ST4of CLEC,there are more errors and higher error rates in ST4than those in ST3. Moreover,more types of error occur in ST4. That is to say, the shell noun misuses in CET-6compositions of non-English majors’ writing are more obvious than those in CET-4compositions of non-English majors’ writing. The possible reasons include twoaspects. One is the attrition in SLA from the linguistic perspective and the other islack of generalization which leads to insufficient intake from the cognitiveperspective, especially from the perspective of Cognitive Construction Grammar(CCXG).Thirdly, shell nouns, as a kind of abstract nouns, is a common linguisticphenomenon in English learning. BRM model, grounded on Conceptual BlendingTheory, Reference Point Model and Metonymy, reveals the cognitive mechanism ofshell-content construction, that is, shell nouns, as our idealized reference points,encapsulate complex chunks of information; correspondingly, as shell contents, complex chunks of information fill with semantical blank of shell nouns. Shell nounand shell content is the relation of frame-to-value, more exactly, container for contentrelation. As for the reasons for shell noun errors, there are interlingual andintralingual causes from the linguistic perspective. Negative transfer of Chinese isthe main reason in interlingual causes. Overgeneralization and oversimplification arethe main intralingual causes. In addition to the reasons from the linguistic aspect, themismatch of shell-content construction’s meaning and form is the source of shellnoun errors in writing by non-English majors from the cognitive perspective. In otherwords, though non-English majors may have acquired the forms of shell nouns andtheir shell-content constructions, they have not mastered the meanings of them well,and vice versa.Fourthly, conducting an error analysis from both the linguistic perspective andthe cognitive perspective definitely enriches Error Analysis theory in SLA.