A Comparative Analysis Of The Use Of Shell Nouns To Construct Stance In Chinese And British College Students’ Argumentative Essays

Shell nouns are a subset of abstract nouns.“Shell” is a metaphor for the nature of encapsulating propositions.Their specific context meaning can only be interpreted by referring to the surrounding co-text rather than their lexical meanings.Typical examples of shell nouns are idea,fact,problem,etc.Previous studies on shell nouns mainly concentrate on their cohesive function in discourse,while little attention is paid to their role in stance construction.Moreover,shell nouns are most frequently studied in research articles,but receive less attention in student writing.The purpose of the study is to explore the similarities and differences of stance construction via shell nouns in Chinese and British college students’ argumentative essays.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the frequency and distribution of shell nouns in Chinese and British college students’ argumentative essays?(2)What are the frequency and distribution of stance expressions in Chinese and British college students’ argumentative essays?(3)What are the similarities and differences of shell nouns used by Chinese and British college students to construct stance in argumentative essays?The study adopts Schmid’s semantic classifications of shell nouns and the classification of stance proposed by Biber as theoretical frameworks.First,50 argumentative essays written by Chinese and British college students were selected from the British Academic Written English corpus(BAWE)respectively,and two corpora(CSC and BSC)were set up.Next,all texts were tagged with part of speech by Tree Tagger.Then,the regular expressions of the four variants of the N-that grammatical pattern(N-that;N-to;N-of;N-what)were searched via Ant Conc to retrieve shell nouns.The following step was to check the concordance lines and clean up the data manually.Finally,the shell nouns were counted and classified according to their semantic meanings and types of stances.The followings are the major findings of the study.Overall,there are fewer shell nouns in Chinese college students’ argumentative essays compared to British equivalence and the writing lexicon of Chinese students is more limited;all the variants of noun complement clauses are underused by Chinese college students;factual,mental,modal,and circumstantial shell nouns occur more frequently in British students’ argumentative essays.British college students use more epistemic and attitudinal stance expressions in their argumentative essays.In both corpora,there are more shell nouns marking certainty or doubt,actuality,precision,or limitation than marking the source or perspective of knowledge;stance expressions of attitudes or evaluations are more than expressions of personal feelings or emotions.In addition,there is no significant difference in the style-of-speaking stance expressions across the two corpora.Most epistemic stance expressions are from modal and factual categories of shell nouns.Shell nouns marking “possibility” are used more frequently than those marking“certainty”.Most attitudinal stance expressions are mental and eventive shell nouns and most instances of evaluation are largely context-dependent and are conveyed implicitly.Possible causes of the similarities and differences are the students’ language competence and the characteristics of argumentative essays.The study reveals the characteristics of stance construction via shell nouns in student argumentative essays written by Chinese and British college students and it is hoped that the research findings can shed some light on the teaching and learning of argumentative writing.