Disciplinary and intra-disciplinary developmental variation in shell noun use in undergraduate student writing

Huang, Xiaomei (2023). Disciplinary and intra-disciplinary developmental variation in shell noun use in undergraduate student writing. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This study, drawing on insights from systemic Functional Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics, explores disciplinarity and intra-disciplinary developmental variation in undergraduate student writing in light of a specific linguistic aspect: the use of shell nouns (Schmid, 2000). Briefly, shell nouns are semantically abstract nouns whose meaning may only be understood by referring to their surrounding co-text. More specifically, this study aims to explore how the use of shell nouns in student writing is associated with conformity to the epistemological orientations of hard and soft science disciplinary domains. In addition, comparisons across different cohort year groups within each disciplinary domain are also carried out.

Particular attention is paid to shell nouns that occur in six grammatical patterns, consisting of four complementation patterns and two syntactic patterns headed by demonstrative this. These features are investigated across a sub-corpus of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus (Nesi et al., 2004), representing L1 undergraduate disciplinary first-year and final-year essays form three disciplinary domains: Arts and Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. A corpus-based approach was adopted for the study of these linguistic features. Following this, a mixed-methods approach was then adopted through which the identified features were quantitatively and qualitatively examined at various levels of linguistic analysis. Quantitative and textual analyses revealed distinctive disciplinary flavour and some patterns of intra-disciplinary developmental variation in the use of shell nouns as observed in the BAWE data. The study shows that, a). The hard science disciplinary domain favours non-finite to-infinitival clauses while soft science disciplinary domain shows a preference for finite that- clauses as preferred shell noun complement constructions. b). In the hard science disciplinary domain, the uses of shell nouns tend to emphasize tentativeness, empirical objectivity, and scientific rationality, whereas in soft science shell-noun uses are inclined to express epistemic certainty, subjectivity and discursiveness in the process of new knowledge-making. c). Within a given disciplinary domain, shell-noun uses are influenced by levels of study. It is suggested that the findings in the thesis may be useful for cultivating student writers’ awareness of the use of language that carries disciplinary specificity.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

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