A Comparative Study of Shell Nouns in the Abstracts of Chinese Master’s Theses and Research Articles by English Expert Writers

Abstract

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.