Abstract

"There is a possibility that"...—Shell Nouns in Academic Writing by Chinese and Swedish

Highlights

  • As a special type of abstract nouns, shell nouns such as fact, problem, type, method and issue work as shells because “when they are used in this function, they can enclose or anticipate the meaning of the preceding or succeeding discourse” [1]

  • This result is in accordance with that of [16], in which Jiang obtains a frequency of 101 cases per 100,000 words for the “noun + complement” structure of shell nouns in papers of hard science and 328 cases per 100,000 words in soft science

  • The results in this paper indicate that even though Chinese and Swedish scholars have different first languages and cultural backgrounds, they adopt shell nouns in a quite similar way in academic writing

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Summary

Introduction

As a special type of abstract nouns, shell nouns such as fact, problem, type, method and issue work as shells because “when they are used in this function, they can enclose or anticipate the meaning of the preceding or succeeding discourse” [1]. Previous studies on shell nouns focused on various aspects, such as functions [5], lexico-grammatical patterns [6], classifications [7], premodifiers [8] and errors in using shell nouns [9]. Contrastive studies of shell nouns usually aim to compare people with different language proficiencies, like expert and novice writers [1], research papers in different disciplines, such as natural and social sciences [12], or writing productions by native and non-native speakers of English [13]. Few papers have investigated the use of shell nouns by two groups of non-native speakers of English. Whether shell nouns are used differently in the English productions by scholars from two non-English speaking countries remains unknown yet

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