English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells

Commentators and Corpora: Evidence about Markers of Formality

“…UNATTACHED PARTICIPLES); (1929:652) This actually sounds rather like the discourse markers sometimes referred to as shell nouns, i.e. a way of summing up a form of logical relationship previously presented in detail in the text (Schmid 2000), a use which they find to be too vague. In all other respects, thus is passed over in silence.…”

A Qualitative Analysis of Shell Nouns Used by University Students from China and Sweden

“…When an abstract noun is inserted in a certain lexico-grammatical pattern, this noun can be considered as a shell noun [11]. Because there is no specific category for shell nouns in the grammatical system of English, and it needs specific context to determine whether an abstract noun is a shell noun or not, so we use abstract nouns instead of shell nouns for some of the comparisons in this paper, as shell nouns are included in the category of abstract nouns and have basically the same conception with abstract nouns.…”

Recurrent Formulas and Moves in Writing Research Article Conclusions among Native and Nonnative Writers

“…In each corpus, a number of identified bundles did not seem to occur and fit into any move or step of the move. Most of these bundles included shell nouns (Aktas & Cortes 2008, Cortes 2013, Schmid 2000, which is "a type of abstract noun that has little or no meaning in itself" (Cortes 2013, p. 40). This is the case of the nouns found in bundles such as the fact that the in the native corpus and in terms of the in the L2 writer corpus:…”