A Study On Stance Of Shell Nouns In English Academic Writing

Shell nouns are a type of abstract nouns,which can be used to construct stance in English academic writing.Typical examples of shell nouns,such as fact,problem,idea,etc.Shell nouns are pervasive in academic discourse,and they not only play an important role in textual interpretation and cohesion,but also have the evaluation function.However,scholars have relatively few researches on the evaluation function of shell nouns,especially for the comparative study of Chinese and foreign journals.Therefore,this paper attempts to reveal the stance construction of shell nouns in the two corpus by investigating the frequency and lexico-grammatical patterns of shell nouns in native English scholars and Chinese English learners’ academic articles database.This study is based on two corpora constructed by the writer.Corpus 1 is 30 academic articles written by native English scholars published in international journals and Corpus 2 is 38 academic articles written by Chinese scholars published in Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics.The researcher compares and analyzes the use of thirteen high frequent nouns(fact,result,effect,reason,factor,problem,process,purpose,task,topic,change,experience,approach)and explores their construction of stance in Corpus 1 and Corpus 2.This study regards one lexico-grammatical pattern of Schmid’s lexico-grammatical patterns framework “N-cl” as the starting point.Then the writer uses the software AntConc to determine the frequency of these 13 shell nouns and identify their lexico-grammatical patterns and then analyzes the stance construction of these nouns in the two corpora.The findings are as follows:Firstly,the thirteen nouns are high frequently used in the two corpora.Among the 13 nouns,task,result,and process are most frequently used as shell nouns in the two corpora.Although the total frequency of these nouns in Corpus 2 is slightly higher than that in Corpus 1,nine of these 13 selected nouns(result,effect,fact,reason,topic,change,task,approach and experience)are used as shell nouns more frequently in Corpus 1 than in Corpus 2.Secondly,the most frequently used lexico-grammatical patterns in the two corpora is “N-that” pattern.Thirdly,these 13 high frequently used shell nouns tend to express the epistemic stance in the two corpora.This paper discusses the use of shell nouns to construct stance in Corpus 1 and Corpus 2,which can help to deepen the understanding of shell nouns and deepen the research on the construction of stance.