Shell nouns as grammatical metaphor revealing disparate construals: Investigating the differences between British English and China English based on a comparable corpus
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Min Dong
Min Dong is Professor of Linguistics at School of Foreign Languages, Beihang University, China. She earned her PhD in linguistics from Beijing Normal University and carried out her one-year academic visit (2013–2014) to University of Birmingham, focusing on corpus linguistics. Her research interests include corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics, particularly grammatical metaphor theory. Her publications have appeared in most major CSSCI linguistics journals. She has been the principal investigator of one NSSF grant (14CYY021) of China, one H&SSF grant of the Ministry of Education (10YJC740025) of China and one SSF grant (12WYB014) of Beijing Municipality.
Alex Chengyu Fang received his PhD in linguistics from University College London. He was deputy director of Survey of English Usage, University College London, assisting Professor Sidney Greenbaum with the grammatical annotation of the ICE-GB corpus. He is now Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong, lecturing on corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics and stylistics. He has published widely on corpus-based linguistic studies, including
Text Genres and Registers: The Computation of Linguistic Features published by Springer in 2015. He is an expert member representing China in International Organization for Standardization in the area of language resources and co-authored the 2012 ISO standard for dialogue act annotation. He is also an expert member in the China National Technical Committee on Terminology and Language Resources for Standardization.
Abstract
This article describes a study of shell nouns (SNs) complemented by appositive that-clauses observed in a two-million-word corpus of media English by British and Chinese writers. The grammatical metaphor theory was applied to the data in the light of a novel proposal that the metaphorical forms of SN+that constructions, in their contextual semantic settings, serve to re-construe various transitivity processes. The study produced significant findings, including: (1) the two writer groups demonstrate significantly different preferences for SN types but the British and the Chinese uses are instantiated from a common core set; (2) the Chinese group prefers the re-construal of Identifying Relational processes of facts and evidence as markers of neutral and impersonal discourse; (3) British writers favour the re-construal of Verbal processes of assertion and stance and tend to re-construe Attributive Relational processes with varying degrees of commitment to the encapsulated propositional truth; (4) both groups are inclined towards the re-construal of Mental processes of cognition with a common preference for the re-construal of the experience of knowing, believing and thinking. The findings above lend important empirical support to systemic functional theories and suggest further research in the future regarding SNs as indicators of disparate construals in discourse.
Funding statement: Research described in this article was supported in part by grants received from China’s National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Sciences (Project No 14CYY021), Beijing Municipality Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Sciences (Project No 18JDYYA005) and City University of Hong Kong (Project Nos 7004491, 7004755 and 7004940).
About the authors
Min Dong is Professor of Linguistics at School of Foreign Languages, Beihang University, China. She earned her PhD in linguistics from Beijing Normal University and carried out her one-year academic visit (2013–2014) to University of Birmingham, focusing on corpus linguistics. Her research interests include corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics, particularly grammatical metaphor theory. Her publications have appeared in most major CSSCI linguistics journals. She has been the principal investigator of one NSSF grant (14CYY021) of China, one H&SSF grant of the Ministry of Education (10YJC740025) of China and one SSF grant (12WYB014) of Beijing Municipality.
Alex Chengyu Fang received his PhD in linguistics from University College London. He was deputy director of Survey of English Usage, University College London, assisting Professor Sidney Greenbaum with the grammatical annotation of the ICE-GB corpus. He is now Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong, lecturing on corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics and stylistics. He has published widely on corpus-based linguistic studies, including Text Genres and Registers: The Computation of Linguistic Features published by Springer in 2015. He is an expert member representing China in International Organization for Standardization in the area of language resources and co-authored the 2012 ISO standard for dialogue act annotation. He is also an expert member in the China National Technical Committee on Terminology and Language Resources for Standardization.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the comments and suggestions received from Professor Susan Hunston of University of Birmingham, Professor Naixing Wei of Beihang University and the two anonymous reviewers of the Journal.
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Alternations emerge and disappear: the network of dispossession constructions in the history of English
- Switch-reference and its role in referential choice in Mbyá Guaraní narratives
- Investigating genre distinctions through discourse distance and discourse network
- Lexically specific accumulation in memory of word and segment speech rates
- Why don’t grammaticalization pathways always recur?
- On the benefits of structural equation modeling for corpus linguists
- Pre-emptive interaction in language change and ontogeny: the case of [there is no NP]
- Shell nouns as grammatical metaphor revealing disparate construals: Investigating the differences between British English and China English based on a comparable corpus
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Alternations emerge and disappear: the network of dispossession constructions in the history of English
- Switch-reference and its role in referential choice in Mbyá Guaraní narratives
- Investigating genre distinctions through discourse distance and discourse network
- Lexically specific accumulation in memory of word and segment speech rates
- Why don’t grammaticalization pathways always recur?
- On the benefits of structural equation modeling for corpus linguists
- Pre-emptive interaction in language change and ontogeny: the case of [there is no NP]
- Shell nouns as grammatical metaphor revealing disparate construals: Investigating the differences between British English and China English based on a comparable corpus
