A Comparative Study On The Use Of Academic Noun Phrases In Graduation Theses For English Major Undergraduates And Postgraduates

Noun phrase,in short terms,is a language structure composed of modifiers and central words(nouns).Noun phrases as an indicator of syntactic complexity can even predict the quality of writing.Academic nouns are those words that are commonly used in academic writing,and they are the most representative and important part of academic writing.The AVL,a new academic vocabulary list created by Gardner and Davies(2013),represents the high-frequency words used in academic writing at present.The creation of academic vocabulary list determines the central word of noun phrases that can be quantified in this study.At home and abroad,a prominent gap in the empirical study of noun phrases is the lack of researches with academic nouns as central word.In addition,the corpora used by relevant research institutes at home and abroad are mostly published academic papers,essay writings,native language writings,etc.The use of noun phrases in English major graduation theses is limited to abstract research.There are very few studies on the use of noun phrases in the main body of the thesis.Moreover,in the use of specific phrase patterns,there are many studies on the structures of “adjective-noun” and “noun-noun”.However,the specific frequency and collocation patterns of other noun phrases have not been analyzed in depth.Based on this,this study proposes the following two research questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the use of academic noun phrases with one modifier in graduation theses between English major undergraduates and postgraduates?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the use of academic noun phrases with multiple modifiers in graduation theses between English major undergraduates and postgraduates?In order to answer the questions,the author takes the North University of china as an example.About 270,000 words of English major bachelor thesis corpus and master thesis corpus are created.Lin Shengshu(2016)studied the academic noun phrases based on Corpus of Research Articles from International Journals.The author uses some of the research results as reference.The results show that there are similarities and differences in the use of simple academic noun phrases as well as complex academic noun phrases in graduation theses of English major undergraduates and postgraduates.Similarities: the most frequently used academic noun phrase patterns are adj + AN;the proportion of noun pre-modifiers in academic nouns can not be underestimated;prepositional phrases are the most important post-modifiers;when adjectives are used to modify academic nouns,the possibility of using post-modifiers is greater than that of using nouns to modify academic nouns.These findings are consistent with Lin’s results.However,what are inconsistent are that: there are still obvious gap between the use of noun modifiers and adjective modifiers;academic noun phrases use more pre-modifiers than post-modifiers;the diversity of prepositional phrases as post-modifier is insufficient.Compared with international authoritative journal articles,there are also the following shortcomings: the use of non-finite clauses as post-modifiers of academic nouns is relatively small;the use of clauses as post-modifiers of academic nouns accounts for a much smaller proportion;the proportion of complex academic noun phrases in the total collocation is not high.Differences: compared with undergraduates,for academic nouns,the proportion of postgraduates using pre-modifiers has decreased,but the proportion of using post-modifiers has increased;the proportion of prepositional phrases as post-modifiers of academic nouns has decreased,while the proportion of clauses used as post-modifiers of academic nouns has increased,and the proportion of non-finite clauses used as post-modifiers of academic nouns has increased;the proportion of using complex academic noun phrases has increased.These progresses show that the academic noun phrase is a language structure with high textual value in English major graduation theses,which provides a direction for English major graduation thesis writing and teaching,especially English major bachelor theses.Based on these findings,the author suggests that in graduation theses teaching,teachers should increase students’ textual awareness for academic noun phrases in graduation theses,conduct explicit grammar teaching,increase classroom training,and improve their control over complex syntax so that can use them flexibly in graduation theses to improve the writing quality of graduation theses.