A Study On The Use And Function Of Shell Nouns In Academic Discourses From Cognitive-pragmatic Perspective

This thesis aims at studying the use and function of shell nouns in academic discourses. Shell nouns, as a special kind of abstract nouns, are ubiquitous in our daily communication and academic discourses. The most common English shell nouns are: fact, point, thing, situation, problem, method, study, idea and so on. Shell nouns not only have the common property of abstract nouns, but also have their own characteristics. From the perspective of their name, these nouns act like a “shell”, which can encapsulate complex information of its surrounding contexts. Thus, shell nouns are always accompanied with their “shell content”. From the perspective of lexical meaning, shell nouns are flexible in meaning.In recent years, studies on shell nouns are mainly from the perspectives of Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition and Lexicography. The Systemic Functional Linguisitcs in Linguistics focuses on its cohesion function, and Cognitive Linguistics tends to analyze its cognitive features and functions. Second Language Acquisition mainly studies the differences in shell nouns’ using between native speakers and non-native speakers. Lexicography probes into shell nouns’ information expression and grammatic patterns in dictionaries. This study chooses the cognitive-pragmatic perspective, which combines the relative knowledge of psychological construction and psychological cognition in cognitive linguistics and the pramatic functions in pragmatics, so that shell nouns can be understood comprehensively.On corpus selecting, four core linguistic journals abroad are applied so that the results of this analysis can be reliable and authoritative. By retrieving the nouns, a group of high frequency shell nouns are listed. These nouns are studied carefully according to Schmid’s(2000) classification of shell noun uses and the analysis of functions. It shows that these high frequency shell nouns in academic discourses are of maldistribution in classification of use, and a shell noun may functions differently while it is in different contexts. From the perspective of pragmatic and cognitive function, shell nouns contribute a lot in discourse construction, language expression and information memorizing. The findings of this study will have possitive impact on future academic teaching and writing.