This study compares the use of shell nouns in Chinese master’s thesis abstracts and English expert research article abstracts. Based on Schmid’s (2000) definition of shell nouns and Jiang and Hyland’s (2015) functional classification, two small-scale corpora were built: a Master’s Corpus and an Expert Corpus. The findings reveal three major differences. First, experts use shell nouns significantly more frequently than master’s students. Second, experts employ a balanced distribution of lexico-grammatical constructions, with N-that accounting for 18.3%, whereas master’s students heavily rely on N-of and underuse N-that. Third, master’s students overuse event and manner nouns, while experts excel in using cognition, quality, and state nouns to express stance. These findings suggest pedagogical implications for improving Chinese master’s students’ academic writing by enhancing N-that construction training and shifting focus from process description to research evaluation.
Zihan Wu· Frontiers in Humanities and...· 0 citations
This study compares the use of lexical bundles in the abstracts of Chinese master’s theses and those of research articles written by English expert writers. Two small corpora were constructed: a corpus of master’s thesis abstracts and a corpus of expert research article abstracts. Based on Hyland’s (2008b) functional classification framework, four-word lexical bundles were extracted and functionally annotated using AntConc. The findings show that: (1) the normalized frequency of lexical bundles in the expert corpus is significantly higher than that in the master’s corpus, indicating a greater degree of formulaic density among expert writers; (2) in terms of functional distribution, text-oriented bundles account for the highest proportion in the expert corpus (45%), reflecting stronger discourse organizational awareness, while research-oriented bundles account for the highest proportion in the master’s corpus (42%), reflecting a focus on research background and methods; (3) master’s thesis abstracts exhibit certain weaknesses, including a preference for verb-based bundles and vague quantifiers, overuse of certainty verbs, avoidance of first-person pronouns, and formulaic use of bundle patterns. This study provides empirical evidence for the teaching of academic English writing.
Zihan Wu· Frontiers in Humanities and...· 0 citations