A Corpus Based Study on Shell Nouns in Natural and SocialScience Research Articles

Abstract

This study examined structural and functional analysis of shell nouns in research articles of social and natural science disciplines. The purpose of this research was to conduct an analysis of shell nouns with reference to the lexico-grammatical patterns in the academic compositions of Pakistani research article writers. In this regard, this research utilized both qualitative and quantitative techniques for analysis through Antconc software 3.2.4. The data was randomly selected from 20 research articles that were divided into two groups. The principles of Schimd’s (2000) lexico-grammatical patterns, with their functions, were used as an analytic tool for this research. The results revealed that social science writers used lexico-grammatical patterns more frequently with their function in their writing to develop more cohesiveness by following the taxonomy of Schmid (2000) as compared to natural science research article writers.