A Comparative Study of Shell Nouns in English Academic Writing by Chinese and Swedish Authors

Sammanfattning: This thesis aims to examine factors that influence the use of shell nouns in the writing production by Chinese and Swedish authors. Based on previous studies of shell nouns, this research establishes a theoretical model and a hypothesis is put forward: Though writing in the same genre, Chinese and Swedish authors have different ways of adopting shell nouns partially due to first language transfer. The verification of this hypothesis involves research samples from four corpora across two genres:Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners and Uppsala Student English Corpus made up of argumentations, and two self-established corpora composed of SCI research articles by Chinese and Swedish authors. It is found that in argumentative essays Chinese authors use significantly less shell nouns compared with Swedish authors and the lexico-grammatical patterns used by Chinese authors are not as diverse as those by Swedish authors. Whereas Chinese authors use the pattern the + N and this/that + N mostly, Swedish authors prefer the pattern the + N + that. As for the cohesive function,Swedish authors are more likely to use shell nouns to establish cataphoric reference. In research articles, however, the comparison shows that though Chinese authors still use significantly less shell nouns, especially cognitive shell nouns, the two groups of writers show no significant difference in choosing lexico-grammatical patterns, premodifiers or other classes of shell nouns. A qualitative analysis indicates that linguistic features including methods of texture, popularity of nouns, concrete and abstract dictions and sentence patterns result in the different use of shell nouns, which confirms the hypothesis. As the degree of difference is not the same in the two genres, a possible explanationis suggested: the genre “argumentation” has weak restriction compared with the genre “researcharticle”. It is the difference in genre restriction that makes Chinese and Swedish authors adopt similar or diverse ways of using shell nouns. A pedagogical implication of this thesis is th at language teachers should pay attention to the influence of genre in writing courses and conduct flexible teaching based on features of different genres.