Types and Features of Noun Phrase in Chinese Scholars’ Abstracts

Li Wang,Fei Pei

doi:10.5539/ijel.v5n6p84

Abstract

Noun phrases, as the basic components of sentences, carry large amounts of information. Based on corpus-based research method, this study aims to explore the use of nouns in the journal abstracts written by Chinese scholars. Statistically significant difference was found in the noun effect between Chinese scholars’ dissertation abstracts (CSDA) and English-speaking scholars’ dissertation abstracts (ESDA), so effect was chosen as an example word throughout the research. The results show that (1) Chinese scholars tend to use more simple noun phrases while international journal scholars are inclined to use complex noun phrases in their articles. (2) As for the use of the colligation adjective+effect, Chinese scholars are likely to use synonyms or to replace the more appropriate adjectives, which cause non-native expressions. (3) As for the colligation of effect+preposition, in is most frequently used by Chinese scholars, but seem to be untypical to the international journal scholars. The study found that interlingual transfer (mother tongue transfer) and intralingual transfer appear to be the main causes of these discrepancies.

Highlights

A range of studies has indicated that noun is a dominant part of speech, and the semantic content of sentences is borne mostly by nouns (e.g., Algeo, 2006)
Significant difference was found in the noun effect between Chinese scholars’ dissertation abstracts (CSDA) and English-speaking scholars’ dissertation abstracts (ESDA), so effect was chosen as an example word throughout the research
Few of the researchers have focused on noun phrases (NPs) in the aspect of scholars’ dissertation abstracts with the corpus linguistic method and few of them have done the research by comparing Chinese scholars with international scholars

Summary

Introduction

A range of studies has indicated that noun is a dominant part of speech, and the semantic content of sentences is borne mostly by nouns (e.g., Algeo, 2006). The importance of the NPs in English was acknowledged by generations of language researchers, and a large number of them paid extensive attention to noun-phrase types and features. In the most important two publications of corpus-based grammars, the Comprehensive Grammar of English (Quirk et al, 1985) and Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al, 2000), numerous surveys on the structures of NPs were carried out and tremendous useful conclusions were drawn which enlightened the latter language researchers profoundly. This paper focuses on the use of types and features of noun phrase (NPs) for Chinese scholars. This paper attempts to find types and features of NP in the aspect of Chinese scholars’ academic writing abstracts through a corpus-based contrastive approach, in order to probe into the underlying reasons of those distinctions

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