Functions of "shell nouns" as cohesive devices in academic writing

This study compares the functions of abstract nouns previously defined as "shell nouns" (Schmid, 2000) to create cohesion in academic texts written by professional published authors and international graduate students. To make this comparison, two corpora of research papers, one by international graduate students and one by published authors, were collected from 6 different academic disciplines (Art and Design, Biology, Computer Science, Economics, Environmental Engineering, and Physics and Astronomy). The 35 shell nouns (Hinkel, 2004) were investigated in order to find out the frequency patterns in both corpora. The six shell nouns identified as the most common ones in the published corpus were qualitatively compared between published authors' and international graduate students' writings, and further analyzed for cohesive functions through different lexico-grammatical patterns in the two corpora.