Abstract
This article investigates the shell nouns in popular and professional science articles. This examination reveals the preferred ways of evaluation in these two genres. The study shows that, despite the overall similarity in semantic distribution, there are distinct variations in shell-noun use between the two genres in word frequency, semantic types and syntactic constructions. Furthermore, these distinctions can be reduced to the difference of structure, subjectivity and knowledge between the two genres. Popular science articles tend to be more explicit in making evaluations than professional papers. Whereas research papers prefer to choosing those nouns and constructions which express more informative, objectivity and scientific rationality. This comparative study expands current understanding of the discourse functions of shell nouns and can also help cultivate writer’s genre awareness.
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